I’ve been shopping online for a digital camera using Yahoo Shopping. It provides listings from multiple retailers and allows you to compare prices. There are a handful of retailers with significantly lower prices posted for the item I am interested in. The catch is that the items they are selling are “refurbished”, not “brand new”.
My casual research tells me that refurbished products are items that have been returned to the store for any of a number of reasons, from “didn’t work” to “works fine, don’t want”. The items are then returned to the manufacturer for repair, testing, and repackaging.
My gut feeling is that they wouldn’t try to sell the item again if they hadn’t thoroughly repaired and tested it.
I really like the price break, but is it worth it to buy a refurbished item? I would appreciate any feedback, personal experiences, additional knowledge about buying a refurbished product.
I bought my first camcorder in 1990 as a refurbished unit. It has worked great since except for the fact the 3 batteries I have are junk and no one makes them anymore. I am now limited to the 6 foot long AC adaptor so I am currently using it as the worlds largest webcam.
The engine in my wife’s toyota gave out at 90,000 miles. There was nothing else wrong with the car, so we put a refurbished engine into it for about $1,000 and got another 30,000 miles out of it before some drunken assmonkey rear-ended it.
I would check to see what kind of warranty you would get with the refurbished product, and how long it’s good for.
I’ve only bought one refurbished product, a Dell desktop computer through their website. I ordered a two year service/warranty plan with it. When it was delivered to my house, there were no indications that it wasn’t brand new - everything looked very clean, software was shrink-wrapped, no stray programs on the computer (looked like a fresh rebuild), nothing seemed amiss. I’m very happy with the purchase, and the cost was a significant savings over what a new one would have been.
I bought a “refurbished” Epson Photo printer for a huge discount and it’s great. The vendor said that he had purchased the inventory of a failing dot.com and since they opened all the boxes to make sure everything was there, they were legally obligated to call the inventory “refurbished” even though it had never been used and most consumers would consider it new.
I used to work for a big consumer electronics company and it was commonly believed that their refurbished products were often better than the ‘brand-new’ ones. During normal production, only a percentage of the products were tested, just to assure quality. But a product that had been found to have a problem was repaired and then tested far more extensively before being sold as refurbished. I have several such products and they have all worked without problems.
We bought a KitchenAid stand mixer three years ago from the “refurbished” section of their online store, and it has worked just fine. In fact, we went back and ordered another for my mom, which has also functioned without problem for 2 years now.
I must heartily agree with everything else that’s been said. Many moons ago, I purchased a refurbished Dell laptop and a refurbished Sony Clie PDA (at different times). When they arrived, I couldn’t tell them from new - shrinkwrapped, original packaging, documentation, everything. My guess is you’ll do fine, and the savings are great.
My digital camera is refurbished, and it’s been great. I’ve bought other items refurbished, including a hard drive I still need to install, and I’ve never had any problems before.
If it is a factory refurb their should be some sort of tell-tale mark added. This would typically be a small dot or indentation added to the serial number on the camera body.