Sony Support/Service - My opinion

[bakubo]

I don't really understand how a camera can have 5 trips to service and not be fixed. Maybe there are Gremlin cameras out there that just can't be put right. I had 3 Nikon repair attempts that just didn't solve my AF problems.

Yeah, me too. Sony didn't fix my A700 either, but with my earlier 7D experience I wasn't willing to repeat the rigamarole and ship the A700 to Sony 5 times. It is a royal pain in the butt usually for me to ship a camera off because I may not be in the same place for a long time. When I sent the A700 in I shipped it from Texas, but had to arrange for it to be returned to Hawaii and at the time I sent it to Sony I didn't have an address to send it back in Hawaii. I finally was able to persuade someone I barely knew in Hawaii (a real estate office) to accept delivery of the camera for me. The 5 times I shipped the KM 7D I often had similar types of dilemmas since I was spending time in Canada and in the U.S. in various places. At least, KM still accepted it under warranty since the problem started (Day 1 problem) before the 1 year warranty expired. The A700 problem also started before the warranty expired, but Sony refused to do anything about it under warranty after the first attempt.

[bfitzgerald]

Just to add some more to this I found some "unusual" looking A57 night shots. I was actually looking for 35mm f1.8 samples (ie to buy something with that voucher Sony gave me) and ran across this.

http://www.pixel-peeper.com/lenses/?lens=13191&p=54
Scroll back to the previous page too and some more odd looking ones.

Henry don't dump that A700 might be in the market for one shortly!

[bakubo]

I don't really understand how a camera can have 5 trips to service and not be fixed. Maybe there are Gremlin cameras out there that just can't be put right. I had 3 Nikon repair attempts that just didn't solve my AF problems.

Yeah, me too. Sony didn't fix my A700 either, but with my earlier 7D experience I wasn't willing to repeat the rigamarole and ship the A700 to Sony 5 times. It is a royal pain in the butt usually for me to ship a camera off because I may not be in the same place for a long time. When I sent the A700 in I shipped it from Texas, but had to arrange for it to be returned to Hawaii and at the time I sent it to Sony I didn't have an address to send it back in Hawaii. I finally was able to persuade someone I barely knew in Hawaii (a real estate office) to accept delivery of the camera for me. The 5 times I shipped the KM 7D I often had similar types of dilemmas since I was spending time in Canada and in the U.S. in various places. At least, KM still accepted it under warranty since the problem started (Day 1 problem) before the 1 year warranty expired. The A700 problem also started before the warranty expired, but Sony refused to do anything about it under warranty after the first attempt.

Today I saw something and it reminded me that my KM 7D had the special 2 year Shake Your Body warranty instead of the normal 1 year warranty. I had forgotten about that. So, I need to take back some of those kudos I gave to Sony. My 7D still had quite a bit of time on the warranty when Sony threw up their hands and said they couldn't fix it. Who knows how much money it had cost KM and Sony for the many trips in to be unsuccessfully fixed -- although I had to pay ship it to them all except 2 times. By giving me a refund on my warrantied camera they probably saved themselves money. That is fine though since I don't really care what their motivation was.

If Sony hadn't done the refund then no doubt I would still have it and it would be sitting unused along with the A700 because I won't sell something I know to have a problem without disclosing it to potential buyers. The result, of course, is that almost no one will buy. I am glad that I didn't get stuck with the 7D.

[Dr. Harout]

Barry have you seen this topic? http://www.dyxum.com/dforum/horizontal- ... 2.html#top