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[OM] gripe about repair charges [long]

Subject: [OM] gripe about repair charges [long]
From: William Sommerwerck <williams@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 18:56:38 -0700
This is the letter I will be sending to Olympus USA and Popular Photography in a
day or two. Comments would appreciated. Thanks.


I'm writing to complain about Olympus USA's excessive repair charges. But before
I document my gripe, I want to tell you a story that sheds a lot of light on the
sad and sorry state of service in the States.

About five years ago I paid a week's visit to J. Gordon Holt in Colorado. Mr.
Holt is the founder of Stereophile magazine, which I used to write for.

Mr. Holt owns a Pioneer LD-S2, probably the best laserdisk player ever made.
During my visit it failed, and we searched for a local place to repair it. (Mr.
Holt needed the player for movie reviews and couldn't wait to send it to
Pioneer.) We found a shop that charged $75, a reasonable price, so we schlepped
the unit over.

When we arrived we discovered that the woman who answered the ?phone didn't know
the difference between a CD player and an LV player. The repair charge for the
latter was $150!

Needing the player, and unwilling to press the point that he'd been "lied" to,
Gordon agreed to the higher charge. During our conversation, the counter man
freely admitted that the tools and skills required to repair an LV player were
not much different from those needed for a CD player, but his company charged
more simply because they could! LV players were perceived as being more complex
than CD players, and that misperception could be converted into a bigger repair
charge.

Now to my tale of woe?

Around Christmas of 1995, I purchased an IS-10 from J&R Music World for $400. I
own an OM-4T, but I don't want to risk an expensive camera when I'm just taking
snapshots. I'd previously carried Styluses (first the original, then the 35-70
Stylus Zoom), but as an SLR aficionado I was willing to sacrifice compactness
for TTL viewing and a usefully-wide lens (28mm).

The IS-10 gave me generally good service. The only real trouble (up to now)
occurred at a Christmas party, when the wind failed to stop at the end of the
roll, and the motor tore the film off the spool. I returned it for a checkup,
and was told that "maybe the batteries were weak." Uh-huh. (So weak they had to
display their machismo by tearing the film, right?) I chalked it up to the
occasionally quirky behavior of CMOS.

At a 1998 Christmas party (is there a pattern here?), the flash failed to fire
(or fired out of sync--I don't know which) for a sequence of six shots. I
assumed it was a glitch of the same sort.

When the IS-30 was announced, I rushed right out in a buying frenzy. This was
the camera the IS-20 should have been. I posted an ad for the IS-10 in Micronews
(I work for "billg"), figuring I could get $200.

Not caring to sell the camera and have the buyer want his money back because it
was defective, I tested the IS-10, even though I "knew" it was working
correctly. Yoiks! The autofocus didn't work.

Oh, it focused, but it was consistently off a bit, regardless of the distance.
And the motor made buzzing and "jerking" noises. Everything else on the camera
appeared to work correctly.

I sent it in for an estimate and got a whopping $150 invoice! The reason? "Sand
damage." According to the woman I spoke with in customer service, this actually
means "excessive dirt in the mechanism."

"Oh. So you opened the camera?"

"No, we get so many cameras for service each day we can't do that."

"So??"

"We opened the back and the battery compartment."

Uh-huh.

Gentle Olympus folk, there was no significant amount of dirt in the back of the
camera or in the battery compartment when I shipped it. I'm very curious as to
how a basically clean film chamber and battery case are proof of dirty guts.

So why do your repair technicians think my camera needs a complete overhaul
(which is what the $150 charge covers)? Perhaps it's because the camera is over
four years old, and they think they can get away with a big repair bill. Or
they're so incompetent they don't know how to diagnose a defective product.

The latter is highly likely. When I bought my OM-4T body, I had the good sense
to get an extended warranty. The body initially worked okay, but eventually
developed weird electrical problems, such as excessive battery drain, incorrect
exposure, and malfunction of the Memory system.

I returned it for repair three times, and each time the camera came back
unrepaired, or with a new set of problems. Olympus had no choice but to replace
the body. The replacement has performed flawlessly for almost five years.

When a technician returns a camera that hasn't been repaired--and does so three
times!--you have to seriously question his intelligence, skills, or training.
You also have to wonder about the management of a service department that lets
this sort of thing happen. If a product is returned because it wasn't fixed the
first time, it should be sheparded through the second repair to be absolutely
certain it's fixed. It would seem Olympus needs a pastor.

And, yes, I have room to complain. In 1980 I worked part-time for Jack Rubinson
at Chestnut Hill Audio in Philadelphia. Jack once said to me "Bill, you're not
the fastest-working tech I've ever had. But the things you fix don't come back."
True. I never released an item unless I was certain it was fixed.

Now, what's the probability my IS-10 suffers from "excessive dirt"? Well,
everything else works. Why is one motor apparently bad, and all else okay? If
the focusing motor jerks around, does that mean the motor is dirty *--or are the
autofocus electronics bad? I vote for bad electronics--especially considering
that Olympus SLRs have a track record of flaky electronics. **

I understand the customer's desire to know the correct repair costs before
service begins. Over the last 20 years, most companies have switched to a flat
repair rate or a tiered pricing system. The problem with tiered pricing is that
it encourages the service department to err on the side of
overcharging--especially when the "estimate" is based on a quick look, rather
than any actual analysis.

Which raises another point--how much profit is a business entitled to make on
repairs? The simple, obvious answer is "none." Repair departments should be run
on break-even basis. It's bad enough that the customer has "injured" by the
breakdown of his camera, but to "insult" him by gouging on the repair is
outrageous. A business is entitled to just one profit on each sale.

Actually, I wouldn't mind paying $150--if I thought at least $50 of it were
going into the serviceman's pocket. He's probably lucky to see $30.

I didn't expect the IS-10 to last "forever." It is, after all, not built to the
standards of an OM-4T, or Nikon F5, or Canon AE-3. I figured it would give about
eight years? use (roughly $1/week for that period), and I could "toss it" (if
need be) without feeling bad about it.

Unfortunately, it's a bit over four years old, which is not a reasonable service
life for even a cheap Instamatic. I'd be lucky to get $200 for it, and the
repair charge is ¾ of that!

Damark sells refurbished IS-10s for about $225. Would it be too much to ask
Olympus to swap out my IS-10 for, say, $75? (This is not a rhetorical question!)
Which is about what this repair should have cost in the first place.

I expect an intelligent, thoughtful reply to this letter--not "Tough--take your
business elsewhere." (Where else am I supposed to take it?) I've been a happy
Olympus owner for 25 years. I recommend Olympus cameras to my friends. Am I
going to have to tell them that Olympus doesn't give its customers a fair shake?

* Actually, there's no "focus" motor, as such. The IS-10's lens is varifocal,
not zoom. Two lens groups must be moved by two motors to focus or to change
focal length. How is it that the alleged "excessive dirt" screwed up only one of
these motors?

** I owned an OM-2. Remember the classic "needle bob"?


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