Casio has just announced yet another of their Exilim cameras, this one in six megapixels, with a cool new preset for taking pictures of your existing paper pictures in your photo albums.
Normally I'd be drooling for the chance to buy one of these. The Exilims have a great UI, they're a great size, and they take great pictures.
But I have had a string of unimaginably crappy experiences with the company and after owning and giving away eight or nine of these things, I've come to the end of my love-affair with Casio.
Here's the problem in a nutshell. The cameras are very failure prone, and the repair service is terrible, and the company doesn't honor its warranties.
I had one of these cameras go south last October, the lens frozen halfway out of the camera. The thing was only a few weeks old, so I took it in for service. Months later, they still hadn't fixed it. The UK depot was "awaiting parts" but they couldn't tell me when they expected to get them in. It's one thing when a third party repair place can't get parts, but when the manufacturer is doing the repairs, there's no one to blame for these delays except the manufacturer — in other words, if Casio can't ship Casio parts to Casio, it is Casio's fault, not the fault of an unfair universe.
Then I upgraded to the S100, which had a big, gorgeous screen. Unfortunately, the big, gorgeous screen is designed to stick out from the camera so that if there's any compression at all on the device while it's in your pocket (these are marketed as "pocket cameras") it's the ultra-fragile screen that bears the brunt of it. This is just stupid design, and competing cameras don't make this mistake.
Within a month, the screen had cracked. I brought it in for warranty service, but was told that the warranty wouldn't cover it. It was "damaged," not defective. The repairs would cost 90 pounds, nearly the price of a new camera. What's more, Casio once again couldn't get parts for the camera, so it took more than a month to get a simple — but wildly overpriced — repair on a brand new, badly designed camera. To make matters worse, they charged my credit card days after they returned the camera, and unfortunately, I had cancelled that card after it was stolen. Instead of calling me to get a new credit card number, Casio sent the bill to a collection agency, so when I got home from my latest round of travel, there was a note threatening to have me arrested for nonpayment of the bill (!).
I'm an idiot. I bought another of these cameras, the S500, which is currently the top of Casio's line. It, too, has a screen that protrudes from the camera's body, and it, too, cracked within a month. The company is charging me another 90 pounds to fix this thing, and they've had it since October 4. No parts, you see.
So that's it for me and Casio — it's a shame. The cameras are small, pretty and work well. But they suffer from flawed designs and a flawed manufacturer that treats repair customers like crap, and I can't think of a single good reason to go on giving them my business, no matter how cool this new six megapixel camera sounds.
(via Shiny Shiny)
