Just got my 5D Mk III (Refurbished) &....

[canon23]

Hi All, so all my postings regarding the 5D Mark III & w/all your helpful responses have gotten me to this point. I just got my 5D Mark III !!! I'm 1/2 excited & 1/2 don't-know-if-I-should-be-concerned. I just got my 5D Mark III, and this being my first refurbished purchased ever (bought it directly from Canon Store), I have slight reservations. So, I come to you all for some questions I'm not sure about. First thing I checked was to see was the serial # and see which batch this body belongs too...to my slight concern, the 6th digit is a "1", so this belongs to the very first batch. And of course this being refurbished, should I be concerned? If so, what should I specifically look for. Good thing is, it came with the latest firmware update, version 1.2.1 (so I can be somewhat confident Canon looked into & tested this camera & updated the latest firmware before putting it on sale). I just wanted to throw this out and see what I should be concern and look for in particular?

Also, which site is the 'most accurate' in checking out the shutter count for this body?

Thanks again all!!

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

You should not be concerned. The light leak was a non issue, but Canon put a piece of tape in to plug it. I'm sure that the production cameras had the same fix.

You have 14 days to return it, and a 1 year warranty.

The very first thing I do is to use FoCal to set the AFMA on all my lenses. I might take a few quick shots first just to confirm its working, but without first doing the AFMA, I'd not worry about resolution and sharpness.

Somewhere in there, I take a dark frame and check for any excessive stuck or hot pixels, and a oof f/22 shot of a blank area of the sky to check for dust on the sensor.

 

[canon23]

You should not be concerned. The light leak was a non issue, but Canon put a piece of tape in to plug it. I'm sure that the production cameras had the same fix.

You have 14 days to return it, and a 1 year warranty.

The very first thing I do is to use FoCal to set the AFMA on all my lenses. I might take a few quick shots first just to confirm its working, but without first doing the AFMA, I'd not worry about resolution and sharpness.

Somewhere in there, I take a dark frame and check for any excessive stuck or hot pixels, and a oof f/22 shot of a blank area of the sky to check for dust on the sensor.

Thanks Mt. SP!

Any suggestions on where to go (reliable one) to check current shutter count?

 

[PhotographAdventure]

For shutter count, you can pay a small fee and do it here at http://eoscount.com

or

You can do it yourself if you have some time: you need a linux distro like fedora and do a quick virtual machine with virtualbox. Once you have it up, you install and run an app that can read just about any camera shutter count.

I posted a blog about it here with screenshots: http://photographadventure.com/blog/2013/how-to-find-your-camera-shutter-count-photography/

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

You can get shutter count if you use FoCal Pro, and its available if using Magic Lantern.
You can also get it using eos count, but they charge you, its flakey, and doesn't work with mac's. You can supposedly use gphoto2, but that's pretty obscure.

 

[PhotographAdventure]

Thanks for the other options Mt Spokane, I was not aware of those. gphoto works, but takes some time to setup. I suppose Magic Lantern might be the easiest? I have yet to try it on my 5d iii.