(commentary)
Registered D600 owners in the US received an email from NikonUSA this week. The email? Essentially an update of Nikon's service advisory for the camera, dated March 28, 2014.
NikonUSA has a new president, part of Nikon’s recent management shuffling. Let’s hope that this is a sign that he’s determined to fix Nikon’s recent reputation here in the US, not just a delay in getting information to D600 owners. Still, not having the service advisory on the site but sending it directly to registered owners seems just a bit on the not-quite-getting-it-right side of things.
I first reported and began regularly covering the dust/splatter problem on D600’s back in late 2012 not long after the camera came out. Nikon first posted a short article on how to clean the D600 sensor back on March 25th, 2013 that didn’t exactly admit a problem. It wasn’t until the class action suits fired up in early 2014 and China’s state TV news tackled the issue that Nikon offered their first public acknowledgment of the problem and their offer to solve it for anyone experiencing it. The week’s email to registered users comes almost two years after the camera first appeared. Ironically, one of the many folk who sent me a copy of Nikon’s email was one who bought one of the first copies of the camera and never had a problem with it ;~).
If you have a D600 that might need service, use this link in the US.
Update: an earlier version of this story said that NikonUSA doesn’t list the D600 service advisory on their site. Apparently I caught NikonUSA in a site update when I wrote that. It now appears when you click on the Service Advisories link. Curiously, the date is listed as February 25th on the index page, but March 28th on the actual advisory page.
