Originally posted by ohmic314 I'm sorry, but I think you're wrong in this. Ricoh has restricted us to one place that is allowed to repair the camera (in the US). If you look at reviews of other repair houses before Ricoh limited us to Precision Camera, you'd see people were happier. These other places probably charged more, which is why Ricoh took them off the approved repair houses. Why else would Ricoh take off a repair house people were happy with?
In the world of big contracts, lowest bidder generally wins.
I'm pretty dissatisfied with having 1 authorized repair facility here, but I wouldn't consider BBB or chargebacks or even mention them to anyone until at least mid April after Precision has had ample time to get parts. .
Yes, I know that's a loooooonnng wait. But if the parts are on order then it is just a sit and wait matter. No amount of discussion with anyone is going to speed it up.
THAT SAID, I would still (politely) let Ricoh know how this makes you feel as a customer of a mid level camera looking to upgrade to bigger lenses and camera bodies in the future. It is pretty much the norm (There have been articles written on the same delays in parts with Nikon for instance) but the norm quite frankly stinks. That said, outside of parts, Nikon has multiple authorized repair facilities stateside. I think Canon does too.
I think this is one way how they keep prices down and allow us to have dirt cheap 300 dollar camera bodies though.. skimp on repair services..