Live from Austin!

In 2001–2003, I had a rather bad experience with Nikon Digital’s repair service. The product I had problems with was an APS adaptor for a high end film scanner, but other people have written to me with similar tales of woe regarding digital cameras and digital SLRs.

Briefly:

1. I discovered that while Nikon are reknowned for the quality of their lenses, they also make some really shoddy products. High price and the Nikon name is no guarantee of quality.

2. I found out that if you buy a faulty Nikon digital imaging product, such as a scanner or a digital camera, your chances of getting it repaired or replaced with a working product seem to be pretty slim.

3. When Nikon were unable to get the product to work after four attempts, I couldn’t get a refund for the non-working product without a year of ignored letters, phone calls and faxes.

4. The Nikon product jammed with some of my irreplacable negatives inside. I couldn’t open up the unit to get the film out without voiding the warranty, and Nikon failed to extricate and return the film.

I did finish scanning the rest of my APS film cassettes, no thanks to Nikon. I had to break open each cassette, pull out the film, and chop it up into individual frames. I then mounted each frame in a 35mm glass slide, adjusting for the size difference by using plastic spacers cut by hand from old subway passes using a sharp knife and a metal ruler. As you can imagine, the process was very fiddly and laborious and no fun at all.

Anyway, here’s the whole sorry tale…

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Spent an intellectually stimulating but ultimately fruitless few hours trying to port a piece of badly-written Amiga software to Mac OS X.

Copied a bunch of TV shows to tape for Laura.

The APS adaptor for my film scanner broke. Luckily it’s still under warranty. I could do without the hassle, though. I’ve decided to ship it back to Nikon, and have them repair it—then I’ll try and scan every single roll of APS in as little time as possible. If it breaks again during that time, I’ll demand a refund. If the worst comes to the worst, I can extract the APS film from the cassettes by brute force, scan the negatives using the film strip holder, and pretend they’re 35mm. It’s not like I’ll ever get any more optical prints, after all.