I’ve just bought a cheap compact camera to take on rides; it was £149 including a case and memory card (and obviously a battery). I thought that I’d look at getting a spare battery to take too but find that the official Canon replacement is a whooping £80.99! A Duracell equivalent (albeit 1000 rather than 1250 mAh) is less than 15 quid.

This is taking the pee surely, how do they justify that price?

Wheelchair service companies.

£100 for a 5 min callout, handing the mechanically clueless carer a  £148! replacement brake cable and leaving…

Fitting would have been another £50. Can’t help but feel that piss has thoroughly been taken.

Fitted it for him at our accessible bike group in a couple of minutes and gave the chair a quick once over too in an attempt to correct the karmic imbalance.

how do they justify that price

Some people will pay it –  that’s all the justification they need.

This is taking the pee surely, how do they justify that price?

I’m going to have a guess that they aren’t even trying to.

Someone will buy it, someone else won’t. They are probably happy with that.

Does a £150 camera take better pictures than an iPhone 8 ?

(Genuine question, I haven’t owned a camera for years, but I take a lot of pictures)

Careful with the cheap batteries though, there’s either a lot of fakes or Duracell license out their brand indiscriminately. The one I bought (from Amazon directly) never fitted my camera properly and ran out of charge very quickly.

I bought a Mountfield battery powered lawn mower, it came with a charger and two batteries.  Just out of interest I priced up the batteries and charger and they were roughly the same price as the complete kit so basically I got the mower for free.

 Does a £150 camera take better pictures than an iPhone 8 ?

Possibly not, although I’ve never owned a smart phone (let alone and iPhone 8) to compare. However the Canon PowerShot SX620 HS I bought has reasonable reviews and a seemingly decent 25X zoom which might help me capture some wildlife shots (without the need of bolting lenses on the front of a phone).

I’d hope that it was at least as good.

Does a £150 camera take better pictures than an iPhone 8 ?

It’ll have a much greater zoom range for starters, that’s optical zoom, not digital, which is crap. Yes, I know you can always walk closer to the subject, but that does have a number of caveats attached to it, like wishing to take a photo of a sailing ship, which is maybe a mile out to sea…

Wheelchair service companies.

£100 for a 5 min callout, handing the mechanically clueless carer a  £148! replacement brake cable and leaving…

that’s really obscene

“Does a £150 camera take better pictures than an iPhone 8 ?”

No. I went to the lakes a couple of weekends ago and one of our party had an iPhone 8plus and I had my £500 Panasonic Bridge camera. OK I was only using the Bridge camera in auto mode so not doing anything clever with it, but the iPhone 8 pictures were stunning, easily as good or better than my camera…and he took alot more than me because it was so much more convenient for him to get out of his pocket vs. me unzipping the case, taking off the lens, turning it on, waiting a second for it to fire up, aiming the camera and framing before taking the shot.

On the same tangent….

I’ve got an Samsung S7 and a Fujifilm bridge camera.  For standard daylight snappy snaps there’s no difference.  The cameras in high end phones these days are staggering.  The only issues are low light because of sensor size and lack of optical zoom.

I’ve also got a decent compact, with a great optical zoom, but it just falls into a black hole these days and doesn’t get used.

Wheelchair service companies.

£100 for a 5 min callout, handing the mechanically clueless carer a  £148! replacement brake cable and leaving

A couple of years back I got a job for one of these companies in Stockport, I left after 3 days because of similar practices to the above as I didn’t agree with the ethics, they seemed to do zero actual maintenance just quoted for new parts such as a complete rear axle assembly when all that was needed was new shocks.