I’ve been shopping for a new digital camera. I require a superzoom (10x or greater) and a great macro. I have been very happy with Olympus until the zoom’s focus became unreliable for some reason.

After some research, I decided to buy the Sony Cybershot DSC-H2. I stood in OfficeMax with one in my hands and was very close to buying it. Later, I stood in Best Buy with the H2 and the newer H5 and could see the H5 blows away the H2. The larger LCD will help with my macro shots and the more dense pixels of the electronic view finder will help with everything else. This is a bigger and more expensive camera than I really want, but 12x excites me.

I did some of my research at a great website, www.imaging-resource.com (recommended by my photo-freak friend, Lisa). That site lists online sellers and it was through them I found www.butterflyphoto.com (BFP), which has this camera for the least amount of money, bottom line. The listing for BFP showed lots of buyers and a very high rating.

On the BFP website, the initial purchase process went fine. The next day, I got email from BFP instructing me to call “Tom,” plus a phone message from Tom himself before I could call. No word as to why I should call. So, I sent email, but got no reply. I called Tom. Tom was very professional in his skillful pitch to get me to buy more stuff. If I were BFP, I’d give him a raise. But I resisted his insistence and urgings and assumed we were done with an unpleasant dance.

Then I got the same email, this time to call Chris. I wrote Chris and said I’d been through it all with Tom. Then I got the same email — exactly the same robotic email every time — again and again and again from Tom. Maybe there’s a problem. Maybe there’s something great, like a free gift. Couldn’t one of these email message vary just enough to include some information?

In 10 days’ time, I have received a dozen of these uninformative emails. In that same time, I checked the status of my order online several times a day. For the longest time, the status was “PVR.” What does “PVR” stand for? Not a clue is offered anywhere on the BFP website. The designer of that webpage should be ashamed to display an unintuitive abbreviation without any help. But I think BFP counts on customers being unsure enough to call.

I may appear a fool, but I feel that if a business can use email, it should. I find the unvarying emails from BFP irritating. I also feel that if a business has a well-designed website with a status page, it should be used to communicate something useful. (In fact, after about 10 days, “PVR” was replaced with “call Tom” — not quite literally, but nothing more helpful than that.)

Eventually, I relented. I called again because I believed no one at BFP would ever compose an original email message containing helpful information. Ironically, calling for the third time — in the middle of the afternoon — I got Tom’s phone message. I’m not surprised he never returned my call. The fourth time I called, I said, “send it or cancel it.”

This morning, the miscommunication ended. BFP sent a generic cancellation email. No useful information. I’ll shop elsewhere. mjh

PS- I feel no obligation to balance this report. While I don’t believe the customer is always right, I do believe a company that wants to do business with me — a company that has email and status webpages — needs to communicate with me by email. That said, I’ve talked to several people who had satisfactory service from BFP. Don’t avoid them just because I will from now on.

PPS- During this limbo time, I’ve read about an 18x zoom from Samsung and saw two Panasonic Lumix models top a survey that found some fault in the H5. God works in mysterious ways.