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Nikon D70 CF card/BGLOD warranty rejected!

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jmark

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NIKON changed my BGLOD warranty claim repair to a $200 charge. Says I damaged the CF card pins by forcing the cards! I am really upset about this. The camera has always been tough to seat the cards IMHO and now I am forced to pay for the repair! If the camera is that sensitive I may have made a mistake with Nikon! I am upset and may just dump the whole lot!
 
email sent to Nikon:

I was very disturbed to hear today that service #4362168 has been determined to be CF pin damage caused by me and thus would be a $200 charge for repair. To say that I am upset is putting it mildly. The camera started failing with CF card inserted and worked fine when the card was changed out. I only use Lexar or Sandisk cards specifically approved for the D70 and have had 0 problems till this last shoot. I have taken hundreds of pics with no problems. I am always very careful with my equipment and have spent several thousand dollars on the camera with Nikon extended warranty as well as two additional Nikon lens (80-200 AFD & 300 mm f4). I will pay the repair bill but I am seriously thinking of dumping the whole lot and trying a competitor. The camera battery was defective and had to be recalled as well. I will not recommend Nikon based on this experience and will make sure my story is heard on the various digital camera boards I am active on. To think I was even thinking of moving up to a D200.......I am already going to have to rent a camera body for a shoot this weekend. I shoot auto racing and have been published several times in the time I have had the D70. (August '05)

Sincerely,

Mark Boudoucies
 
Meaby it is better to say nothing at all on your post,becouse you are mad now.
but are you sure the pins are ,or where ok.

it is possible nikon have seen this problem,and thad is not the blob effect.
and therefore the charge you for it.

Don,t be mad on me its not my fault.
I just point to an possible isiu.

Wat iff nikon sent you the camera back without repair,would you be happy?

I just hope you are 100% sure the pins where ok
the could be bent before and never give you trouble exept today.
I am not saying you are an liar,but it is possible.

I realy do not think nikon will say the pins are bent if the are ok.
nikon have an reputation to keep.

Thad is my idd,but yours can be deference.
Sorry to hear about your camera I hope nikon will fix it anyway.
jmark said:
I was very disturbed to hear today that service #4362168 has been determined to be CF pin damage caused by me and thus would be a $200 charge for repair. To say that I am upset is putting it mildly. The camera started failing with CF card inserted and worked fine when the card was changed out. I only use Lexar or Sandisk cards specifically approved for the D70 and have had 0 problems till this last shoot. I have taken hundreds of pics with no problems. I am always very careful with my equipment and have spent several thousand dollars on the camera with Nikon extended warranty as well as two additional Nikon lens (80-200 AFD & 300 mm f4). I will pay the repair bill but I am seriously thinking of dumping the whole lot and trying a competitor. The camera battery was defective and had to be recalled as well. I will not recommend Nikon based on this experience and will make sure my story is heard on the various digital camera boards I am active on. To think I was even thinking of moving up to a D200.......I am already going to have to rent a camera body for a shoot this weekend. I shoot auto racing and have been published several times in the time I have had the D70. (August '05)
Click to expand...
--
Demarren
Using Olympus E-10 D70-s
Website http://demarren.zoto.com/
 
I didn't check the pins. The camera worked fine until the last shoot. Then BGLOD like problems begin.....I am careful with my equipment. The CF card can only go in one way. Is the D70 that fragile?
 
Bent CF pins are in no way Nikon specific. It happens and on pretty much anything that uses Compactflash. If you do a search on google for bent compactflash pins you will see plenty of stuff.

Here's a company that fixes bent cf pins on the canon 300d (just to show that it's not anything specific to Nikon).

http://cgi.ebay.com/Canon-EOS-Digital-Rebel-300D-Repair-Service-Bent-Pins_W0QQitemZ6037462347QQcategoryZ50336QQcmdZViewItem

Second, no company warranties against bent cf pins. So if you had it happened on a canon it would not be under warranty either.

Just stating the facts, don't shoot the messenger.

--
Everyone has a photographic memory...some just don't have the film.
 
I know how fragile the pins are and any misalignment is potentially fatal.

That is why I have often wondered why people pull the cards and use card readers to dump the pictures when the USB port on the camera does the job.

No one can be in so much of a hurry to see their pictures that the speed difference of USB 2.0 High Speed is worth the risk to the compact flash socket.

Hook up the camera, set up the transfer, and go eat dinner if you can't wait.
 
JonGrif said:
I know how fragile the pins are and any misalignment is potentially
fatal.

That is why I have often wondered why people pull the cards and use
card readers to dump the pictures when the USB port on the camera
does the job.

No one can be in so much of a hurry to see their pictures that the
speed difference of USB 2.0 High Speed is worth the risk to the
compact flash socket.

Hook up the camera, set up the transfer, and go eat dinner if you
can't wait.
Click to expand...
And being a Computer tech and overseeing many photographic students, I can tell you that I have seen more failures to the connectors within the USB socket on cameras than anything else. The movement between the USB plug and onboard socket is far greater than achieved with a CF card and I have seen more times where the central connectors of the USB socket have been broken off or cracked than I have bent or broken CF pins.

Cheers
 
With that being said, I've been using the USB connector for 2 years now and it still works just fine. I'm in the camp that says you risk the part that you can work around. If the USB connector fails, it doesn't affect the usability of the camera. Worst case, you use a card reader after such a failure. If the CF pins bend or break due to misuse or overuse, then you're in deep trouble and will be unable to shoot.

I'm surprised the repair was only $200. I've heard people say they paid far higher repair costs for bent pins on a P&S.

We should all keep in mind that the BGLOD is the way the camera communicates that -anything- is wrong. We just simply happened to have one single issue that a lot of people had (myself included) that Nikon would cover. A BGLOD repair isn't always going to be free.
 
CheersUK wrote:

"And being a Computer tech and overseeing many photographic students, I can tell you that I have seen more failures to the connectors within the USB socket on cameras than anything else. The movement between the USB plug and onboard socket is far greater than achieved with a CF card and I have seen more times where the central connectors of the USB socket have been broken off or cracked than I have bent or broken CF pins."

Maybe your students are just clumsy. I always plug in the cable when the camera is just above a big open space on my desk, set it down, and do the transfer. There is no way I could damage the socket as I am very careful and, as an electrical engineer, I do things in a systematic manner.

Although I agree, the socket could easily be damaged if a lateral force were applied to the hard part of the plug while it was connected to the camera. It would act like a lever and could do a lot of damage to the socket.
 
Just a note, many people in this thread say that USB is the workaround to the bent pin problem. And it absolutely is, if you only shoot with one card. I have a half-dozen sandisk ultra II 1GB cards and shoot RAW, I go thru all of them in a basketball double-header. 900 RAW shots. An obvious solution would be to get a 4GB or 8GB card, however when you do that, if one card fails, you lose 900 shots instead of 150. Card swapping is a fact of life for DSLR users and only using the USB port isnt an option for most. FYI Ive used photo rescue software, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesnt.

So which risk do I want to take, having a huge CF card flake out and lose a thousand pictures, or having a pin bend and have my camera out of service for a week or two? Good question. Whenever I go shoot something serious I have 2 or 3 cameras with me, so guess what I do.
--
-Dave T.
 
To the best of my knowledge, no one has suggested that you cement a single card into the camera and never remove it. Some simply suggest that you can minimize the swapping by using the USB port on the camera for most if not all of your image transfers. Certainly you will need to remove and insert cards when you switch to an empty one, but if that is the only circumstance under which you do so (like me), you minimize your exposure for the most common digital camera repair... bent CF pins.
 
For those with the D50 instead of D70, are SecureDigital cards afflicted with the same problem? Or is the design of the in-camera reader going to be fundamentally different?
 
For what it's worth, after inserting a new CF card into wife's Canon P+S, the camera failed to read the card. I looked in the slot and noticed a pin was bent, I tried straightening it with a tiny screwdriver and it broke off! DOH!

I sent it back to Canon while still under warantee and they had it fixed and returned in just over a week, at no cost. I never had a problem with my Nikons, but would certainly expect the same service from them.

If you use the USB to download your images, I'd be more afraid of that little rubber hinge failing and the cap eventually falling off and exposing the connection to the elements.
 
JonGrif said:
Maybe your students are just clumsy. I always plug in the cable
when the camera is just above a big open space on my desk, set it
down, and do the transfer. There is no way I could damage the
socket as I am very careful and, as an electrical engineer, I do
things in a systematic manner.

Although I agree, the socket could easily be damaged if a lateral
force were applied to the hard part of the plug while it was
connected to the camera. It would act like a lever and could do a
lot of damage to the socket.
Click to expand...
Thats very true, and obviously their respect for our equipment isn't as great as if it was their own. I also agree that I do things in a systematic manner, but in some ways I feel more in control using a reader, rather than having a camera on a desk with a cable I could catch and drag everything to the floor...maybe systematic, but still human ;)

This brings another point up (refering to the Nikon manual) that I would like to ask users -how many lay their camera by a CRT monitor when transferring pictures from it...or for that matter their card readers? A warning is issued by Nikon about strong electromagnetic sources affecting cameras, and I also know that the magnets surrounding crt monitors can wipe a zip or floppy disk (and no doubt flash storage) in double quick time. In fact, I know that mobile phones can do the same thing.

Who ever said technology makes life easier? ;)

Cheers
 
Peter Davis said:
For those with the D50 instead of D70, are SecureDigital cards
afflicted with the same problem? Or is the design of the in-camera
reader going to be fundamentally different?
Click to expand...
No. They are fundementally different. They work like the pins on USB ports. They don't have tiny holes that have to line up with pins that have to fit inside them. No different than IDE cable connectors, just thinner/smaller.

http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup/what/society/sciences/364436_cf_card.php?id=364436

SD, the card contacts just slide onto the pins in the camera. Now, you can still bend the contacts in the camera, but less likely than CF pin bending.

http://www.ixbt.com/storage/flashcard-test-p12-sdmmc.shtml

http://www.compsys1.com/workbench/On_top_of_the_Bench/MMC_Project/mmc_project.html

--
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http://members.aol.com/neonexpres/bfw2001.html
http://members.aol.com/deathriderpc/esb.html
http://members.aol.com/d70bites/pics
 
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