Help/Advice needed: Small guy (me) vs Big Business

Location: Hong Kong

Hello there. If you aren't familiar with me, I post photos regularly in the HK Exotics Spotting thread. While I'm not anywhere near professional, I see myself as quite a competent amateur photographer and more importantly I am passionate about my hobby and spend as much of my freetime out and about snapping cars.

Now onto my problem. I have always been loyal to one brand of camera, however I seem to have terrible luck with their products. Everything starts well enough, but after a few months my cameras seem to develop the same problem which is excessive levels of noise, over luminecense of bright tones and blurry images. The latest of these problems has occured with my camera which is at the highest end of their non-DSLR cameras. It has developed exactly the same problem as mentioned above.

Now onto my MAJOR problem. I don't want to bore you with the details but I took my camera in to the Customer Service Centre and explained the problem(s), heck I even made a hand-written list of them so the engineer would be completely in the picture (ta-dum ching). I was told by CS that I would be called within 2 days and the camera would be sent back to me fixed in 5 working days. In the end it took 3 weeks to get the camera back. In the meantime the engineer told me A) There is no problem. B) There is a problem but we are going to update the firmware. I told him that I didn't think there was any public firmware update available for the camera yet to which he said it was the in-house firmware. When I got the camera back, it wasn't fixed and the Service Report said 'Reset Camera Data'. Well, you can imagine my anger. They kept the thing for THREE WEEKS and the best they could do was reset the camera data through the menus (confirmed in a phone call). They didn't think for a second that I might not have the presence of mind to do that?!

My boss took the camera back to the service centre today with the brief that I want them to replace the camera or my money back. Their response was that it was normal performance for this camera and that I didn't return it within 7-days (it broke after 3 months), AND they suspect I might have dropped it (can you imagine the audacity of that). Basically, they are not willing to do anything about it.

As you can imagine I am enraged. All I want from them is to A) Admit there is a problem. B) Give me a replacement or C) Give me my money back. It's 'only' a HK$4,000 camera for god's sake (although this is completely not the point). It's not hard and they have nothing to lose. In Europe or North America I am pretty much 100% sure they would just give me a replacement camera. After all, they want to keep their reputation in tact and now I obviously have nothing good to say about the company.

I bought this camera as an investment for when I go to the Lemans Classic race early next month and it looks like it's going to not ruin it but really put a damper on things. I'm not vindictive which is why I'm not going to mention the company here, but I am getting to the end of my tether and I will be making sure of spreading the word to everyone I know of the frankly appalling way that I have been treated.

Does anyone have any advice? I am quite happy to discuss more via PM.

 

Thanks for the replies guys. Even though there's not much to help me take it further I really appreciate you spending the time to read through my gripe. It's a real shame that HK has such poor customer support from the big hitters.

Re the SLR, my original plan was to get a new D90 but my colleague has a Nikon D80 with three lenses for sale for a lot less than the price ($2.5k less) of a new D90. So I'm thinking of taking it off her hands within the next couple of days.