Aguilabrava wrote:

I just wanted to let everybody here know about my recent experience
with the Service Dept. at Nikon USA in Melville, New York.

[...]

Now, it looks just terrible, and I'm wondering how this job was
performed, just by looking at the body's leatherette cover makes me
think that if they were incapable of doing that right, I have no reason
to believe that whatever they did on the internal parts of the camera
was done the right way.

Could you post some images?
Not that I doubt your words: A few years ago they damaged housing
of my F90 as it was send in to clean and lub! I can post an image
of it. They denied that this was them.


BUT: I got also miserable experiences with my two Canon repairs
and cleaning! Among others they made my original package vanish,
promised a replacement which I never received.

Furthermore, I just discovered a drastic fading problem (ca 12
months) with their top of the line A3 photo printers. I am now
fighting to force them to take seriously fading problem in their
printers. Lost cause, I tell you...


Besides I believe that your conclusion about specifically a
problem with Nikon US does not touch the real problem, which
is a downfall of American customer service quality due to
outsourcing to foreign countries and letting service being
made by lowest paid workforce.


I have quite a list of cases like this, not related to
photography though. Let me thus just list a few examples:

1) Linksys, $500 wireless network does not work, 40 emails,
protests, letters, lawyer.

Solution: got $10 cat-5 cable and have now a cable running
across living room, but it works.

2) Symantec SystemWorks 2003 caused drastic performance
problem. Uninstall failed, reinstall of version 2001
failed. After 17 emails and several "troubleshooting"
papers send me by Symantec I gave up and have a crippled
product ever since.

4) Microsoft Streets and Trips 2004 plotted a route through
water in Redwood City, CA. I received several emails
in severely broken English, seemingly from mainland China.
They claimed that Microsoft does not have any control
about the routing database and cannot fix it. Yea right,
I sure believe *that*, I sure do... I received a contact
to a Return Center and we returned the product. We than
received two more emails from service supervisors with
some bizarre verbal "bowing down" and apologies for the
inconvenience. I wrote back, fix the product instead of
wasting your time in writing these elaborate texts and
wasting my time in reading them.

5) Viewsonic 17" screen: FIVE replacements. We finally
got an "upgraded VG700" version, which was also
refurbished. It flickers for approx. 30sec after
going our of screen saver. My wife said she does
not care, she just does not want pack and unpack
these screens anymore...

And so on. Thus as much I am sorry about your FM3,
the reality is: welcome to the club :-(

Thomas


I emailed them again, last Tuesday, and a lady named Melanie Chaplin,
who's a Service Relations Supervisor at Nikon USA replied saying that
she was forwarding my email to Harold Glassberg, Nikon USA Service
Manager because they appreciate customers letting them know when things
aren't right...

And that was all they had to say.

My advise:

1)Do not send your cameras for service at Nikon USA, I had never seen
such a poor and mediocre job performed on a camera that, again, was
mint when it left my house.

2)Do not pay the extra dollars for the Nikon USA guaranteed product,
after seeing this, I don't think it's worth it, this is the same kind
of mediocre people that will fix your camera if anything goes wrong
with it during the warranty period.