At Home with John and Debbie

Normally, people like to moan publically about bad customer service, but don’t talk about satisfactory service. I thought I’d recount my experience when my Canon camera broke within the warranty period.

It’s a Canon S80, and while we were on Paul’s 40th birthday canal jaunt, it hit the dreaded E18 error — this is where it fails to retract the lens, and after a few plaintive whirrs of the motor, flashes up “E18″ on the screen, then turns itself off with the lens still out. In this state, if you turn it on again, it just repeats the bleep and turn off cycle.

I made some ill-advised efforts to persuade the lens in when we got home — applying gentle pressure from various sides, and only managed to make the problem worse — the outermost section of the lens assembly fell into the other parts. I was worried that the UK support organisation would kick up a fuss because the camera was bought in the USA.

I had not registered the camera when I bought it (lazy!) so the first thing I did was go to the Canon website and fill in their online registration forms. I still had the receipt and put in the correct purchase date etc.

It turns out that Canon has a few authorised repair centres, and rather than deal with Canon, you send the camera to them directly. It surprises me that Canon doesn’t at least disguise this as their own operation, for branding purposes. So, I had a brief phone conversation with H. Lehmann’s of Stoke, parcelled the camera up with my contact details, a photocopy of the receipt and an explanation of the problem, and sat back to see what would happen.

Lehmann’s were meant to either fix it, or contact me to explain why it wasn’t in scope for repair under warranty, and quote me for a repair. Two days after I sent it, I got a letter itemising what I’d sent them, containing the words “Invoice to: Canon UK Ltd”, which was promising.

Another two days later, the camera came back in full working order. That’s a quicker turnaround than the time I’d spent not getting around to sending it away.

Now the only problem is that I’ve fallen out of the habit of taking photos. Japan will fix that, no doubt.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 19th, 2007 at 14:25 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.