You may remember that I wrote awhile back about our 7-year-old who dropped and broke our digital camera. We had only had it for a little while, I loved it, and we were all heart-broken that it was damaged.
Well, my wife sent it in to Olympus, they requested the receipt as proof of purchase, we faxed it to them, and they had the camera back to us a few days later. It's completely repaired -- and there was no cost to us!!! Yeah!!!
So, what have we learned from this experience (other than not to let our 7-year-old use the camera)? I'd summarize it as the following:
1. Do business with companies that stand behind their products. Olympus certainly did this for us -- they were great!
2. Keep your receipts. We file all of our receipts and keep everything for 90 days or so. For major purchases (like the camera), we keep the receipts for several years.
3. Don't assume that you'll have to pay for it. We knew the camera was only a few months old and it didn't seem to be damaged that badly. Still, we didn't know if we'd be responsible to pay for the repair or not since the damage was our fault. Olympus took care of us, though (so here's a plug for rule #1 again). ;-)
Please don't take it as a personal attack or anything, but my 5 year old has had her own digital camera for over a year (Olympus D-395) and it's still running strong. Maybe you should teach your kids to respect your equipment. Since she was three I trusted her with me Olympus C-5050 and my GF regularly lets both our 5 and 2 year old use her Olympus D-595. I realize accidents happen, and maybe I've just been lucky, but we've taught her to always use her wrist strap if she is either carrying or using the camera and it's saved the device probably countless times.
PS . . . As you can tell, I also really like Olympus. the D395 was only purchased because we were going through so many disposable cameras and film that it just made sense to get her a little digital since she can go through 24 pictures in about 4 minutes.
Posted by: Traciatim | February 14, 2007 at 09:23 AM