Originally posted by Rondec The cost of the fix to them should be something like 40 or 50 dollars between parts and labor.
My guess is that the cost would be at least two or three times that. Even if the tech is really good, it's going to take him a half hour or so to fix it and do all the paperwork. He's going to have to do some kind of pre-check and post-check to verify the camera was working (except for aperture) before, and that the fix worked. So, something like an hour. The loaded labor rate of the tech is going to be at least $40-50 an hour. Then you pay a bit for the guy doing shipping and receiving and packaging. Say, half an hour. That's another $20-30. The part costs what... $10? Plus $5-10 for random, ancillary hardware like a screw or some wire that breaks, boxes and tape. Then a bit to cover overhead and management, say 8%, so another $8. And then you probably add another 10-20% on top for the inevitability of the fix not working, the camera not working, other random things going wrong. Oh, and does Ricoh pay for the shipping? That's probably another $20-30 round trip with insurance.
I'd say it's more like $150 per fix. And I didn't even account for the fact that Precision is the only US repair facility for Pentax, and they're a for-profit business and would probably build in some kind of fee to Ricoh on top of the actual costs.