customer service in japan

is extremely good. as some of u might hv heard, i was quite pissed off at my camera a few months back becuz of sum dirt that has sumhow made its way into the lens (no amount of blowing wud remove it). so for a while (quite a long while in relation to the period of time since i bought it) i had speckles showing up on the screen whenever i zoomed in wif my cam.

to cut a long story short i finally decided i had enuf of it. i mean com'on, i paid 38000 yen for this camera (it was top of the line when i got it), n i was taking inferior pictures....no, not juz inferior, totally SPOILT pictures....cuz of the disgusting black splotches that faithfully popped up whenever i used optical magnification. so i took it to the Canon Service Center in umeda (thats the osaka equivalent of shinjuku btw) a few weeks back (i was in umeda attending a dinner at which our prime minister...yeah, the big Pak Lah! was present...hehe...actually he held that function for all of us malaysian students in the kansai region of japan).

(desire to blog fades off....)

so i left it at the service center....din dare 2 ask how much it wud cost, although it was still within the 1-year warranty period.....n today went there again 2 pick up the camera, n hey presto! good as new. most importantly, the repairs din cost me A SINGLE YEN! well, considering i had to travel to n fro by train, it cost me about 500 yen....way less than the repair shud! according to the repair description, they actually replaced the entire optical unit, which wud explain y the scratches on the outer lens i made when attempting to fix the problem myself were absent. btw, it turned out that there was nothing wrong wif the lenses, but rather the dirt got itself stuck to the CCD unit inside the camera.

funny thing was, such repairs were explicitly stated as NOT being covered by warranty as they involve (usually) carelessness on the customer's part.

duno if this is related or not, but i remember dat even shortly after i got the cam, it was already showing odd splotches whenever i took pictures of distant objects at night wif flash. as in, the flash doesnt quite reach the object so its not illuminated, but instead the dirt on the lens/ccd shows up bright as day. juz a random thought, move on.

anyway, kudos to canon customer service, n in fact customer service in japan in general. malaysia has lots to catch up in this regard....