I went through the entire lost camera bit in February when I left my Olympus C5000 in a rental car at SYD. A couple of observations:
- you can make a claim on the insurance with some credit cards if the camera was in lost baggage or a hotel room. Mine was in a car, and all of this kind of insurance exclude items lost in a car.
- car rental insurance also generally excludes this kind of loss.
- as noted by cattle, home insurance usually will cover this type of loss, and the cost of deductible/increase in premiums is usually much less than what you get paid to replace the lost camera. You should check however, since it depends on how expensive the camera was and how much gear (memory, case, flash, etc.) you lost with it.
- the insurers will generally have a store that they base their payout on. In my case, it was Henrys, and their price for a C5000 (a great little 5 MB camera, BTW) was about $60 more than Aden Camera (
www.adencamera.com) where I bought the original and the replacement. So it pays to shop aroundm and in some cases even with the deductible you can come fairly close to breaking even.
