You may recall my nervousness when I brought my digital camera into Best Buy for repair nearly 3 weeks ago, and a Geek Squad geek “darkly hinted that the technicians might conclude that a slight dent on the front of the camera voids the warranty.” If that had happened, I was all prepared to make a big speech to the manager, acknowleding that they technically have the right to void my warranty for an irrelevant dent, but pointing out that by doing so, they’d be losing my customer loyalty forever — which would probably mean thousads of dollars over my lifetime, given what a gadget geek I am. Not to mention the potential damage I could have done by blogging about the incident (a la Jeff Jarvis’s “Dell Hell”) and possibly getting InstaPundit to link to it (he linked to Jarvis’s stuff, and he’s blogged negatively about Best Buy before). And this would have all happened because of a dent that clearly had nothing to do with my camera’s problems. “Is it worth it, just to weasel out of one warranty repair?” I was going to ask.

Well, I’m happy to report that I didn’t have to give any such speech. I got the camera back on Tuesday, and guess what? Best Buy’s off-site technicians not only honored my warranty, they went above and beyond it, replacing two parts that I never asked them to do anything about, and whose replacement certainly wasn’t mandated by the warranty. The total, if I’m adding it up right, came to roughly $265 in free parts. Yeah, I’d say I got my money’s worth for the $60 four-year service plan that I bought with the $300 camera back in 2004. :)

According to the Geek Squad report, the biggest deal is that they replaced my whole “optical unit” (i.e., the lens and stuff; there’s a diagram on page 9 of this PDF file), a $160 item. But, surprsingly, they also replaced my LCD screen, a $75 item, which I hadn’t even reported any problems with! It had a bunch of scratches on it, but I assumed the warranty didn’t cover those, so I didn’t ask ‘em to fix it. It’s awesome to have a new one, though. (I put a transparent screen-cover thingy on it yesterday, to try and prevent future scratches.) They also replaced the “bayonet cup unit,” the shiny little ring that surrounds the lens, which looks to cost around $25-$30 (though I have no idea why it would be that expensive), which again was something I hadn’t complained about — in fact, the unit wasn’t even really missing, I just generally take it off because it’s basically just a cosmetic part, and it adds an unnecessary extra step when I want to the process of attaching my telephoto and wide-angle lenses.

Whether everything is well and truly resolved remains to be seen. Things look good for now, but it’ll take some time to be sure, because all three of the problems I was having were sporadic in nature: the camera would occasionally (but not usually) fail to rotate photos correctly; it would periodically (like once every two months) revert to the factory default settings for no apparent reason; and most importantly, it would sometimes (unpredictably) shut down entirely with an E18 error, usually accompanied by unpleasant grinding noises coming from the lens area. The latter problem was obviously the main reason I brought it in, and it is presumably what they were trying to resolve by replacing the optical unit. (Interestingly, they replaced what appears to be the standard PowerShot A95 optical unit, part number CM1-2852-000, with a “sub” optical unit, part number CY1-6484-000. I can’t find any reference to the latter part number anywhere online; maybe it’s a newly desgined Canon optical unit that doesn’t produce the E18 error??)

Anyway, cross your fingers that everything is really solved, but for now I just wanted to acknowledge Best Buy actually treating its customers right (well, this one anyway). Since I was going to use this blog to lambaste them if they’d taken the void-and-run approach, I figure it’s only fair that I praise them here for honoring the spirit of the warranty rather than using its technical terms as a weapon to fend off customers’ legitimate claims of defects and errors that have nothing to do with any damage to the camera. Thanks, Best Buy, for doing the right thing and putting your customers first!