Minolta Corporation
Attn: CPG Service
11150 Hope St.
Cypress, CA 90630

To Whom it May Concern:

I was very disappointed to receive your notice that you would not honor your warranty with regard to my binoculars. They have never been dropped, and if they did in fact break due to impact, the impact was so slight as to go unnoticed by me. I had used them the day before I discovered the breakage, returned them to their case, then found them in two pieces the following morning. If impact did occur to the binoculars, it had to have been a tap against a car door (while cased) or something to that effect. This indicates to me that your product was flawed, and therefore should be covered under your 25-year warranty.

I will be sure to pass on to my many birding and photographer friends how well you stand behind your product, in addition to the rec.birds newsgroup on the Internet. Hopefully you realize that, by not standing behind your product, you lose not only myself as a customer, but anyone else to whom I speak in the market for binoculars or camera equipment.

Though unfortunately I am not in the financial position to buy a new pair of binoculars, I will be damned if I will pay $52 to you for a refurbished pair, essentially rewarding your action of dishonoring your warranty. Though I enjoyed using these binoculars very much and was very impressed with the image quality provided for the price, I will look to a different optics company for my next pair, perhaps Nikon or Pentax. You will have to excuse me if I think that the $100 I paid for your product was too much for the two short years of service I received from them.

In closing, please return my broken binoculars to me without repair, which your form assures me is impossible anyway. Perhaps I can at least get the rest of the summer's worth of use out of them, with the help of some Krazy glue. And congratulations on alienating a 28-year-old potential lifelong customer, a birder, ornithologist, and photographer, who would have been impressed enough to spend thousands of dollars on camera equipment and optics from you, had you been the kind of firm to stand behind your product. Oh yes, and all of his family and friends as well.

Sincerely,

W. Adam Phelps
603 Broadway
Buxton, ND 58218
eudyptes@mama.indstate.edu