It’s getting nice outside and I want to bust out my cameras. My digitial still camera is in tip-top shape, but my camcorder is still mysteriously broken. Whenever I try to use it, I get a flashing “REMOVE CASSETTE ERROR” that won’t allow me to do anything.
I not only happily purchased my Canon Elura 100 mini-dv camcorder, but have recommended it to others, and for no apparent reason it simply does not work. In fact, it hasn’t worked since it was just out of its 1-year warranty period (apparently this is an extremely common problem). This month, my camera will be 2 years old.
This sucks, Canon. Someone at Canon customer support contacted me last Christmas to get this resolved, and were very helpful initially, but things got dropped on their end. I don’t have my original paperwork, because I’m sure it got accidentally thrown away, but it doesn’t really matter. I know that the camera is out of warranty, and I don’t particularly care.
A $400 piece of high-tech equipment that has been taken care of should not fail within two years of purchase. Mine has been sitting in its camera case for at least half of that time, and even when I was using it, the useage was not heavy.
I can’t afford to pay to get it fixed. I can’t afford to buy a new one. I took the time to research the model beforehand, and to invest my hard-earned money into it, because I wanted one that would last.
Now I’m stuck with an expensive paperweight. I don’t even have a service center IN MY STATE. If the website is to be believed, I’ll have to pack up the Camera and ship it to New Jersey just to find out how much it’s going to cost me to get it taken care of. One commenter in a forum said that the fix was $160. Canon told someone else there is a problem with people using different brands of mini-DV tapes, which somehow leads to this problem. That sounds like Canon didn’t build a durable camera to me. Otherwise, they needed to warn people up front to use only one brand of tape.
If Canon doesn’t find some way to fix this, I’m going to have to seriously consider whether I ever buy one of their products again. It’s a shame, too, because when it was working this camera was excellent.
You’ve had good luck with your tech complaints. If you can get Canon to fix it for for free, could you also ask them the send me a Canon 5D or 1Dmk3 camera?
I don’t think Canon is going to crack. I got a pretty predictable response, with them telling me I need to pay to have it shipped to New York so they can check it out.
Then they’ll tell me how much it will be to fix it. This is not the customer service I was looking for.
Too bad. Fortunately, digital video recorders are fairly cheap these days, if you don’t mind being limited to perhaps 30 minutes of recording on a card. Image quality isn’t much of an issue if you limit yourself to YouTube-quality recordings.
It seems that manufacturers are getting very good at predicting life expectancy of their components. As the story goes, it was Henry Ford who first sent his engineers out to junkyards to examine old Model-T cars, so as to see which components were overbuilt. I had failures of various kinds on my Apple Powerbook soon after the three year warrantee ran out, and yes, I am also a bit annoyed with the Apple store ‘hip’ employees.