Uncommon customer care? Yeah, spot on.
A while back (in August to be precise) I bought a brand-spanking-new Blu-ray surround system from Samsung (model HT-D5550), installed it at home together with the TV (also a Samsung), hooked up the Xbox 360 without problems. It’s got a nice glossy black finish (kinda plastic on closer inspection though) and the birds have been singing since then…
Until yesterday that is. My wife told me while I was at work that she couldn’t get the new Lion King-disc to work on it, I figured to myself that it’s probably just a question of who’s holding the remote.
Alas, it wasn’t. After getting home and turning everything on, shoving the disc into the player it starts up. I see the Disney castle. How quaint. The water is moving below the castle. Very nice. Checking what the info-button says on the remote yielded the positively delightful answer that this will go on for another 18 minutes. It didn’t.
I turned off the player, back on, checked for firmware updates (“No new updates available”, of course) and hit play again. Same story, same castle, same moving water for 18 minutes. This is the point in time I opted for the W-T-F-question-mark-combo.
A little googling later it appears some Disney movies might have playback problems in Samsung players. Effin beautiful.
Right, back to the shelf to grab half a dozen other blu-ray discs.
- Pirates of the Caribbean: On stranger tides (Disney)? Nope.
- Prince of Persia (Disney)? Nope.
- Gran Torino (WB)? Nope… uh, what?
- Bucket List? Yep. No problem.
After poking around the player to find where the serial number was located (in the back-bottom-corner of the player which is held quite firmly in place by all the cables in the back, of course) and rigging up a mirror to snatch a photo of it, I went to Samsung’s delightfully unhelpful support-pages to look for where I could submit a ticket, case or whatever they opt to call it. I spotted the “Ask us by e-mail” link and filled in the form with pretty much all the information I’ve just described here above.
Today I was being carefully hopeful while waiting for an answer. Pling! went the phone, new mail. Yay!
After scrolling through the mandatory mail-headers I found the reply to my question. It went pretty much like this:
Typically it’s the software which causes playback problems on some discs. In that case you will have to wait for a new update which will solve this. In your case when you already have updated the firmware you can either wait until the next update, to see if your movies weren’t included, or you can turn to your store so they can have a look at the equipment.
Please contact us again if you have any additional questions.
Best regards,
Samsung Support
Wait, what?
I can either continue to wait and see, if the next firmware update solves my problems or go back to the store (how easy that is, considering it’s online with offices in the other end of the country) with the equipment?
Let’s see. A surround-system with integrated blu-ray player should, by definition, play blu-ray discs.
Right?
Well, it doesn’t. What it does is play DVDs though, but had I wanted a fancy DVD-player for that amount of money, I probably would have bought one.
I guess you might read between the lines at this point and take a wild shot in the dark on what I selected in the feedback section under “This information was useful to me”.
I have a bunch of circle-shaped pieces of plastic in my shelf which are pretty much worthless now. So the big question is what the heck do I do now?
Contact the store?
Disney?
Samsung’s delightful “uncommon customer care” again?
