WatchFan1 wrote:
Hire a lawyer.
It will cost you less than $200 for him to draft a 'nice letter' to them.
I am willing to bet dollars vs. donuts that it's gonna save you $1100
Nah, don't bother. Take them to small claims court, assuming you live in a state where they don't have a facility, and you live in a state with pretty average laws for taking a corporation to small claims court, it will be very easy to serve them, and chances are they won't want to send someone, and will just mail you a check before your court date.
Nikon's West Coast service and repair facility has treated me wonderfully over the years, and I absolutely trust what they tell me. I trust them and absolutely recommend them. All I want to do is figure out what is causing the bayonet mount to be repeatedly bent so that I can stop doing whatever it is that I appear to be doing.
Perhaps I should try their suggestion of finding something to tie the lens and body together. A while ago they recommended a specific third party piece of hardware, but I did not try that because the piece was expensive and looked like it might get in the way. If I remember correctly, it was intended to be used when the gear is mounted on a tripod, not hand held.
Got my camera and lens back. 70-200mm VRII checked out fine, but now requires +20 rather than -20 on my d800 body. I don't know what is going on really. My 14-24mm seems to focus more accurately now though.
You have to "tune" each lens to each body.....once.
And people think that if the number is + or - 20, ; i.e. at the extreme ends of tolerance, that this is worse than say.....+ or - 5 or some other low number. This is not true; i.e. + or - 20 is no worse than + or - 1.
And the size of that number does not indicate the optical quality of the lens you happen to have purchased over the other guy's purchase of the same lens.... or vice versa.
You'll be perfectly fine once you do the fine tuning to bring the number to "0" (zero).
Hardcore wrote:
Ya, I'm getting more and more suspicious. They won't let me talk to technician that did the work so they have no other information other than that both the mount on camera and mount on the 14-24mm are "bent".
I asked for photos and they said they would try. He said it could have been caused from improperly mounting the lens?!?!
I told him there is only 1 way to mount it and if you can cause $1300 damage by mounting a lens onto a camera then it should be covered under warranty.
I'm confused... your original thread stated you sent in the 70-200 along with the d800 for backfocus. now you are stating lens' mounts on both the 14-24 and d800 are diagnosed to be bent did i miss something in between.... :')
The lens-mounting plate itself is metal on Nikons but, except for the D single-digit cameras, the plate is screwed by self-tapping screws into a plastic body.
It doesn't take much jarring of a heavy lens to pull those screws slightly out of their seating.
Walking around with a tripod or monopod over your shoulder when a heavy lens is mounted would be enough to cause such damage; and even travelling in a vehicle with the lens attached to the camera could be sufficient to damage it.
Cameras with a full-metal chassis maybe expensive but they have the advantage of being far more rugged and able to handle heavy lenses without buckling. Literally.
If ultra-long telephoto and other heavy lenses are used on plastic-bodied cameras, extreme care is required in the way in which the equipment is handled — both when shooting and when transporting the equipment.