My problems with Pentax started a year ago.
About ten months after I bought my Pentax K-3II, I had an incident in which the camera
presented uncontrollable rapid shooting which didn’t stop untill I removed the battery since
the switch didn’t work.
There were a couple of times that the camera “froze” prior to that, but I disregarded
the incidents, thinking that it was just a software glitch.
I took the camera to the local dealer in Larnaca/Cyprus (EGalaxy) and they sent it to Greece for service.
I think It was the end of October or the beginning of November. The camera came back around three
weeks later. Two days after, it presented the same problem. I recorded the incident
with my phone (video
here) and took the camera back.
By the end of January and since there was no progress from the service center (their answer was
“they are looking into it” all the time,) they sent me another K-3II from Greece as a loan which was
apparently a demo. And I say apparently because it looked like it had a hard life with lots of dust
in the focusing screen and the mirror area. Anyway I was grateful to have it.
Two months later I received a call from Athens telling me that they couldn’t find the problem so
the camera was already sent to France for further investigation.
A month later they called and told me that in France they had found traces of humidity on a board (corrosion)
implying that the camera had taken water from outside but not saying it with certainty. That was like 4 months
after I had touched the camera for the last time.
I asked if they had seen any traces of “humidity” in Athens and he told me they didn’t. He asked me if I had
dropped the camera in the water and I told him definitely not. Last think he said was that they would ask for
replacement and see if France would approve one.
After I didn’t have any news from them for more than a month (it was June already), I sent an e-mail to
Ricoh in Japan describing my problem. They pushed my complaint to… you guessed it, France
and the aftersales department of Ricoh Imaging Europe.
From aftersales they sent me an e-mail asking me for the serial number in order to find the case.
I didn’t have it since the box was with the camera.
On June 16th (
7 months after I delivered the camera for the 2nd time) they sent me an email from
aftermarket telling me that they had find fluid damage in the camera and since repairing was too
expensive they had sent it back to Athens as it was. He also told me that he mailed Athens about
it and was expecting an answer.
20 days later I was still waiting for an answer, so I mailed aftersales again asking for an answer.
They mailed back that someone from Athens should have contacted me already. He wrote
on the same mail (in a way like “George contact Chris now and resolve the case once and for all”)
to someone in Athens, to contact me and resolve the case immediately and CC the mail to Athens too.
What they were apparently doing was throwing the ball to each other about who would tell
me that the camera couldn't be fixed and that they considered me responsible for the
damage and wouldn’t cover it.
Nobody had said anything by then.
I naturally got annoyed after almost 8 months of this and texted him that they had the
worst customer service I had ever worked with and their delays and lack of efficiency were inexcusable.
His answer was that he contacted the manager in Athens who told him that I had their demo all this time
which I hadn’t told him (1st lie. I had written about it) and that they told him they had already proposed
me to keep the demo (2nd lie) and he thought that their offer was very “generous”.
I answered by rubbing to his face the part of the mail that I had written about the demo.
Then I told him that Athens hadn’t contacted me for 3 months and even if they did now,
I wouldn’t accept the demo anyway.
Lastly, I asked him 3 questions:
A. Why didn’t they see the corrosion in Athens after 3 months of looking for the problem?
B. Did they perform any kind of weatherproofing test to check if their gear actually delivers what they
advertise that it does?
C. How they were sure in France that the board corrosion came from me after the camera had traveled
from Cyprus to Athens , back to Cyprus then back to Athens and finally to France with the plastic mount
cover (no lens) for more than 3 months?
The answer I got was:
A. It took them so long because they were looking elsewhere in the camera.
B. They can’t perform any test because the system consists of the body
and a lens and that both have to be WR?? (Like they couldn’t make waterproof
flange for the mount and test the body.)
C. It’s not
likely (exact words) because the parcels were not damaged.
After that I understood that any further waste of my time had no point and demanded my old camera
to be sent back (which again took them weeks) and gave back theirs.
Even though I knew that the case was burned and Ricoh’s customer service was totally useless, I opened
a case at the Consumer’s protection office (which has no legal authority in Cyprus anyway).
They called me 3 weeks ago and told me that Egalaxy didn’t answer them for weeks
and when they eventually did answer it was for another case (a lens I sent to fix decentering which took them “only” 2 months).
So they just played dumb and I finally accepted that a thousand Euro went down the drain.
Any thoughts?