Saturday 20 April 2019

Guarantee A to Z (Except D)

I buy a fair amount of stuff on Amazon, and have done for a while.  If there's something I need and can afford, and I don't need to touch and see it before I buy, I often buy it there.   I don't tend to give it much thought - I've always had good experiences with Amazon and in the rare case of there being a problem, I have found their after-sales service to be excellent.

I recently gave a short concert, and recorded a video of it on my camera.  The only problem was, the memory chip was full after 30 minutes, so I lost a good 40% of the performance.  There was plenty of battery life left, so I thought I'd invest in chip upgrade.   I found some 1 terrabyte chips on Amazon and ordered one.

1 terrabyte - one million millon bytes, on a chip no bigger than a finger nail.  When I were a lad, a disk of just 300 million byte capacity was about 12 inches diameter and 8 inches high, heavy to lift up, and they fit inside a drive unit the size of a small fridge.  The guy who invented the tech that underpinned them worked for IBM, and he had to take his ideas to Japan, I think it was, before he found anyone prepared to try to make a product out of them.  It became, as we know, very successful and he was made an IBM Fellow for some years before he retired.  I cross paths with his daughter from time to time; she plays the flute and I have a CD by her.  But I digress.

So the chip arrives and doesn't work, and I'm going through the refund process.  The chip was sold through Amazon Marketplace, and to my surprise, I discover in the "small print" that the Amazon A-Z guarantee doesn't apply to "digital items", and specifically, not to wot I bought.  I'm not sure if that means digital items sold through Amazon Marketplace, or any digital item whatever the source.  I'm still going through the refund process so I don't know yet if I've been ripped off or not.

So, whatever, caveat emptor, as always.  *sigh*

UPDATE 1 May 2019   Refund received.  Cool.

5 comments:

Tim Trent said...

I bought an electronic gizmo through the Amazon Marketplace. The refund process worked smoothly for me.

Mark In Mayenne said...

Hi Tim, I'm still going through the refund process, so I can't comment as yet. The post was more about my surprise to find that the A-Z guarantee doesnt apply to absolutely everything you could buy through Amazon

James Higham said...

Just have to watch these people. I’ve been fairly lucky so far.

Bill Sticker said...

The memory controllers on older cameras often can't handle the bigger memory cards. I find a useful rule of thumb is no more than four times the original memory card size will be okay. Say Your Camera came with a 16Gb card, the largest size will the camera will work with is be 64Gb and so on.

Mark In Mayenne said...

Ah yes, thanks for your comment Mr Sticker. Useful info, but in fact I was going to do a bit of swapping about - put the 1Gb into a FLAC player that I know will take it, and move the 128Gb card currently in the player into the camera. I didn't go into the detail.

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