I went to the local Office Depot where I purchased the unit and
talked to the managers. Again they seem to be clueless.
I wrote a letter to Office Depot Headquarters explaining
my complaint and also copied it to David Horowitz, the consumer
advocate.
While waiting for Office Depot response I experimented with
cleaning the ADF: I sprayed a bit of Windex on a couple of blank
pages and ran them through the ADF. Well, that clears all the
streaking and the copier is working fine!
It has been a couple of weeks and I still have not received
any response from Office Depot nor from David Horowitz.
Lessons that I learned: Many of the Extended Warranty may not worth
the paper they are written on. Majority of the appliances, especially
electronic ones will often fail during their manufacturer's warranty
period and also it may make more economic sense and less hassles
to buy new one instead of having them repaired.
Thursday, April 07, 2005
Extended Warranty not worth it..
I bought an expensive (several thousand dollars) photocopier
for my business and a 3-year extended warranty (cost $300) for
it from Office Depot. Its Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) acted
defective. Copying single pages was fine. Copying via the ADF
caused dark streaks across the copies.
I called the warranty depot and after being put on hold for
several long intervals (one was about 40 minutes) I was put in
touch with the "technical service manager". I told him that I
thought the ADF did not seem to work right. He asked me to go through
an inane procedure and returned with the verdict that the defective
ADF was considered a "consumable" hence it was not under warranty.