Samsung (Germany) refuses to replace my 15 month old YH-J70 with hard disk error

[bwprius]

Some weeks ago I sent my Samsung YH-J70 player that has a hard disk failure to Samsung Germany explaining the following:

I bought a Samsung YH-920 in 2005 from a German e-bay dealer. Already then I had several problems because I did not get a well-functioning player in the first place, had to send the player back at least twice and when I finally got a working player, at a certain point it stopped working. Finally and luckily, the German dealer then sent me a black 20 GB Samsung YH-J70 as an exchange. I don’t remember how many times I paid postage for sending or receiving the item. The YH-J70 worked fine for quite some time, however, I felt that the battery duration was not at its optimum, so I took to the official Samsung repair service here in Madrid/Spain. Fortunately, they did exchange the battery free of charge since the warranty was still in force. But then, only two weeks after I got it back, the hard disk only showed the fatal message „Device can’t HDD initialize“. Instead of throwing it away or selling it as an „as is“ item on e-bay, I spent more money in postage and sent the player with ist complete box to Samsung Germany explaining what I have just explained above. I added that I hoped to get „some“ kind of replacement from them.

However, yesterday I received a letter from a German repair service simply stating that the replacement of the hard disk would cost me 256,78 euros. Thank you, Samsung! That is exactly what I was told here in Spain and was the reason why I paid the postage to send it to Germany. The letter also informs me that in case I do not want the item repaired, I can pick it up for 11,90 euros or it will be sent back to me at my own expense. More or less the same cost estimate I got here in Spain from the local technical service but they did not charge me anything for that information.

And this is why I am writing this post. Just to let you know that Samsung’s hard disk players look fine, are great products and all this. But before buying a hard disk player from Samsung, you should be aware that there are many people out there who have the feeling of wasting their money after their products have a hard disk failure (happens not too seldom, I believe).

Do products bought in Europe not have a two year warranty? Could big Samsung not be a little bit generous and send me at least a flash player with half the capacity of the YH-J70 or so?

[CrowdAds]

[lebellium]

Your DD is probably not dead. If you was able to connect it to your computer, that means it's just a software problem you can fix yourself. I got the same error message on a yh-820.
And normaly, you can pick it up free if you show them how you are unhappy ....

[queue]

If you send your player to the German external service partner "Teleplan" I can completely understand your opinion on Samsung's service. Teleplan is responsible at least for computer monitors, and they are horrible. You often have to wait several months without any reaction from them before you get your monitor backl. I had to wait 2 months for my Syncmaster to come back completely covered with some smeary oil-like fluid (not only on the chassis but also on the TFT panel!) so that my first action was to clean it.
If they behave the same for MP3 players, I can't think of a worse service. I don't know why Samsung keeps sticking to them...