sMoRTy71.com: Beware: Kodak warranty service

Beware: Kodak warranty service
As anyone who reads this site regularly knows, I am pretty loyal to the brands and products that I like. I'll blab on about them all day if you let me. However, if you give me bad service, I get very upset. The latest company to give me bad service is Kodak.

I recently sent my wife's digital camera, which is less than a year old, back for a warranty repair. During one of Mahlon's football games, The "Telephoto / Wide" button, which zooms in and out, fell off and I couldn't find it. As you can imagine, it is difficult to take good pictures without the ability to zoom in or out.

In order to get the camera back in time for our Thanksgiving trip to Memphis, we mailed the camera out last week. This meant that I couldn't take pictures of my trip to Chicago (which was a real bummer); however, we definitely wanted to have it for Thanksgiving. Plus, Kodak promises that warranty repairs will be back in the hands of the customer in 7 days, so we were all set.

Well, this morning, I got an e-mail from Kodak saying that they had voided my warranty and wanted either $120 to repair our camera or $35 to send it back! Huh? So I called the toll-free number provided in the e-mail and got, you guessed it, a recording. In order to talk to anyone about my claim, I would need to leave a message and wait for a return call. I imagine that they have gotten a lot of angry callers from people who received their "shakedown" e-mails. Otherwise, I can't figure out why they would put such a frustrating call system in place.

Anyway, I finally get a call back from Sue. She explains that Kodak does a thorough inspection on all of the cameras and that it appears that our camera sustained some water damage (which is absolutely not true) which is going to lead to corrosion which is going to lead to slow painful death for our camera. And, of course, water damage voids the warranty, so they aren't going to fix the button since the camera isn't under warranty. Brilliant, huh?

After several calls back and forth (I must point out that Sue was very helpful throughout the process), Kodak agreed to fix the button and send the camera back free of charge (which is all we asked for in the first place). Now, however, we won't have our camera for our Thanksgiving trip, so I'm still not pleased.

I guess the silver lining in all of this is that, when our camera does die, I'll have one less brand to have to choose from.