Paul,

I am sorry about all your camera trouble. That was alot of money to spend. Did the company repair it to your satisfaction?

I have been very happy with my automatic everything camera. I have owned a Minolta Maxxum 7000 for just about five years. It takes great pictures! All I do is point and shoot. I purchased the camera before my trip around the Galapagos islands. It survived rain to take excellent pictures of Blue-footed Boobies (and I got wonderful closeups of their blue feet with the the 70-210 zoom lens) and two weeks of salt air (we were on a boat). It has been relatively trouble-free.

This is very fortunate for me as I know next to nothing about cameras. To give you some extent of my ignorance, I am unable to manually load film or focus a camera. We use a "manual" camera at work to take slides of microscopic oddities and I must have the technicians load and shoot the thing for me!

For as much as I use my camera (it goes to work with me to capture interesting cases) and as long as I have owned it, you would think I would have learned SOMETHING about the machine. I haven't. It is like my car, either it works or it doesn't. I don't tinker with it or wonder about its mechanisms. If it doesn't work, either someone else fixes it or I buy a new one. (I believe the same can be said for my computer and my men! )