Backstory: A little over a week ago – Feb 26 to be precise – I realized that my camera, my beautiful pink camera, was broken.  A little bit.  Well, the “up” button on the keypad wasn’t working, and this is also the button that controls flash settings so it’s pretty crippling for only being one broken button.

I was quite vexed.  It’s not like I went out and dropped seven hundred bucks on a big ol’ digital SLR or anything, but it was still close to $200 for the camera and it certainly wasn’t anything I was going to be able to fix myself.  I figured I was stuck buying a new camera, and that I probably wouldn’t be able to get it in pink.

Then I had one of those rare moments of inspiration and decided to look up just how long I’d had this thing, which proved to be the first time that I’ve gotten any practical benefit from keeping this site updated.  I’d mentioned buying it in an earlier post. On March 11 of last year.  Which meant that – after I did a little frantic googling to find out how long the warranty was – I had a little under two weeks to get it serviced under warranty.

The next day, I called the 800 number on the warranty and spoke with a very pleasant-sounding customer service rep, who walked me through resetting the camera and verifying that, yes, it was broken, which I suppose they have to do, and then issued me a work order number and gave me an address to ship it off to.

I shipped it off via priority mail on February 28th, got an email a couple of days later telling me that they’d received it, another email Monday night with a tracking number, and a UPS delivery today.  And, yes, the button works again.

Total cost: Something like $5.00 to ship.

It is just conceivable that I’m a little too impressed by this.  I’m sure that other people have things break and get fixed under warranty ALL THE TIME.  This is just the first time I’ve actually had something stop working while it was still covered, so the general smoothness of the process was unexpected and a welcome surprise.

So: Sony Repair Service, two thumbs up.