James10013
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 p.1 #13 · Lithium-ion battery option for Elinchrom Quadra! | |
RayRaff wrote:
Gregg Heckler wrote:
I believe James' point is that you don't have to upgrade if you don't want to spend the money. No one is forcing you too. Their existing battery works just fine. How many hardware makers (computer, studio lighting, cars, appliances, etc.) give you no charge upgrades to their hardware?
I'm not asking for a free upgrade to their hardware. That would be spending the £300 on a new battery and charger.
Many car makers supply free mods when a defect is found in a part under their factory recall programmes. I consider this lack of compatibility to be a defect as the new heads don't need modifying to make them work.
We're being asked to pay £40 per head to modify them to make them compatible with a new battery. Would you expect to have to modify a head if you were moving to a new battery? Clearly some silent updates have been made to the heads as the latest generation of them don't require a mod to work with the new battery. This hasn't been made clear to customers and now we're being expected to pay to fix a problem Elinchrom has given us.
I understand how you feel, but since the heads work with the equipment as originally spec'ed, and with the battery originally supplied they cannot be labeled defective. There is a huge difference between something which is several years old and incompatible with new technology and something which is defective. The term "defect" where manufacturing and design are concerned at least here in the US has product liability ramifications, and it would appear that neither poor quality of workmanship or designing a product which is dangerous or useless are the case with the original Quadra packs or heads.
As for "silent updates," manufacturer's always have the option to alter manufacturing processes to upgrade items so as to make them compatible with new technologies or enhance functionality. The cost of doing so during manufacturing is a lot less costly than having to retrofit items. Sometimes backward compatibility can be acheived seamlessly, and other times it can't. In this case it could not be achieved seamlessly. From a company's/shareholder's position, a reasonable charge for the retrofit seems logical; users of course may feel differently.
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