reggieb
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| p.1 #1 · p.1 #1 · Nikon USA service experience - It was good! | |
I wanted to share my recent (positive) experience with Nikon service. I've heard a lot of negative things about dealing with Nikon USA, so I wanted to share my tale that went well. It might have helped that I was paying for the repair, there was never a question of this being a warranty repair. It was absolutely impact damage to a lens that was well outside its warranty window. Still, the amount of work done, how fast it was finished, for the price paid was more than fair.
My story begins with my 14-24, mounted on my D3s, it rolled to my truck door one day and fell to the ground when I opened it. The zoom action got rough, but it seemed fine otherwise. I used it for quite a while like that. Nikon quoted something crazy for the repair, like $800. Matt Granger has a video where he describes the same problem after his took a fall. His repair cost even more (they had to replace the lens barrel if I recall). After it started to get worse, I found someone that would do the repair for $100. The barrel was deformed, and he fixed it. All was good. The lens performed as new.
Well around a week after getting it back, my girlfriend threw my camera bag over her shoulder. Unfortunately, the bag was open, and the 14-24 took flying lessons. At this point, the lens was stuck at 15mm, but the image was fine. I sent it back to the first guy, paid another $100, and he repaired the aperture blades, apparently the culprit this time. Again, it zoomed, but there was an issue with image quality. When I got a D800 the problem was glaring. It zoomed, but wide open the edges of the frame were just mush. It was terrible. It actually wreaked havoc on a whole vacation's worth of photos.
Well, I decided I had to bite the bullet and send it to Nikon. They quoted me $420 now for the repair. Much less than previously, but I definitely feared that, given the prior repairs, they would open it up and come back with a higher price. Well, it arrived home today after being gone a week, and it's working perfectly. Along with the lens came a slip describing the repair. My $420 basically got me a new 14-24.
The following parts were replaced:
Lens unit
Bayonet mount
Cam ring
Main tube
Lens barrel unit
Front element lens
SWM
Repaired impact damage
Adjusted auto focus operation
Checked optical alignment
Checked resolution
Check communication
And they cleaned it.
Not going to lie, that's a pretty good price for all of that. And it really is working like new again. I've also heard that they are sometimes cryptic on their description of what they actually did to repair a camera or lens. This must have changed, because this was a pretty detailed description of what they did. The repair was well worth what I paid. This lens is getting babied now.
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