Factless

Normally people complain about their experiences with warranty replacement, so I wanted to share this seemly unique painless experience of getting my DVD player replaced under warranty by Toshiba Canada.

I had purchased a Toshiba SD-5970 DVD player with HDMI Video Upconversion (better resolution for displaying on a HDTV display) and 3:2 Pulldown from Future Shop (why does it seem that every time I buy something from them, it turns out to be a bad idea?) in the fall of 2005.

Earlier this year the display panel on the DVD player died, at first I thought I had dimmed the display so I couldn't see it. But after a while I dug out the manual (ek gads) and tried to reset the unit, still no display. Since the remote was pretty sad from day one, and while I could use it to play back discs it was annoying for music CDs where I wanted to know which track was playing.

So called Toshiba, well I did after I found their current toll-free number, the one listed in the manual for warranty calls didn't work, but I quickly found the right phone number on the web site. Once I had the serial number and found my receipt, I scheduled a pickup and Purolator came and picked up the unit in its original box with the remote (I was reminded to include this). That was a Tuesday I believe, on Friday I received a replacement SD-4990 unit with all the same features, plus some trivial bonus features (DivX playback). So I was impressed with Toshiba who answered the phone quickly, with a person in Canada as far as I could tell, and got the replacement unit to me in a short period of time with no hassle.

Now back to enjoying my home theatre setup.