Kodak Ends Service for Many Scanners

[sanking]

I have a site license with Kodak for an Eversmart Pro scanner and the following information was received direct from Kodak, dated February 1st 2010.

Kodak has made the decision to end all service for Kodak 3XXX, 7XXX Series Scanners, and some Kodak EverSmart Scanner models. Support will be provided on a Pay-As-You-Go bais until April 30, 2010. After that date Kodak will no longer provide any support or parts. The specific equipment mentioned are listed.

*All Kodak 3XXX Series Scanners including the 320, 340, 342, 340L, and 342L
*All Kodak 7XX Series Scanners including the 700, 720, and 730
*Kodak EverSmart Scanners
*Kodak EverSmart Pro Scanners
*Kodak EverSmart Pro II Scanners

Sandy King

[cdholden]

Over the years, and with many different kinds of equipment, I've found most companies will notify a year or so in advance. This allows a customer to budget for the upgrade/replacement of hardware. 90 days notice to cut off a license holder is pretty crappy in my opinion.
It isn't their first bad decision. Probably not their last either.

[sanking]

Over the years, and with many different kinds of equipment, I've found most companies will notify a year or so in advance. This allows a customer to budget for the upgrade/replacement of hardware. 90 days notice to cut off a license holder is pretty crappy in my opinion.
It isn't their first bad decision. Probably not their last either.

I hate to see Kodak cut support for the Eversmart, Eversmart Pro and Pro II models, but unless you had a contract with them service was less than lousy as matters stood. A person who purchased one of these scanners in the past several years could expect to wade through a maze of incompetence before finding out that Kodak would not even sell parts to individuals without a site license. I can not recall how many times the Creo/Kodak division failed to return my calls about simple matters involving parts and pricing even after I got a site license, which in principle should have made it easy for me to at least order parts. And technical support, unless you paid for a service contrast, was always on a Pay-As-You-Go basis, with a minimum charge of $90 as I recall.

So good riddance to Creo/Kodas as far as I am concerned. Better to go directly to third-party suppliers, technicians and support than having to waste time dealing with them since in the end you will probably wind up with the third part folks anyway.

I have been told by someone who worked for Scitex before it was acquired by Creo, and later by Kodak, that the business model required that the company make a substantial amount of its profit on the service contract. But it is not a solution for folks like us who buy these scanners on the user market.

Sandy King

[Juergen Cullmann]

Does that mean there will be no supplier in future for spareparts? What´s about lamps and tubes for these scanners?

Juergen

[Frank Petronio]

When I had the Iris I always used the third party service guys, the Scitex service was crazy expensive and all the parts were retail. The third-party guys buy donor machines, no worries there.

[Acetate]

Sandy,

I'm in need of some extra lamps for the Eversmart Pro Scanner. Do you have a part # from Kodak for the those lamps. Do you know a third-party supplier for lamps?

Acetate

[Brian K]

Does Kodak think that by cutting off service for these discontinued products that people will be incentivized to buy their other scanners? And it's not like Kodak is even supporting their existing scanners. When I bought my IQSmart 3 I called Kodak first, left several voice mail messages for their sales dept, even stating on the voice mail that I was ready to pay for one right now. I waited a month for a return phone call, finally I found a dealer who could sell me one (dealers for it were not even listed).

Finally, 3 months after my last voice mail to Kodak one of their salesmen returned the call. What kind of business sense is it to ignore a customer who is ready to fork over $20k?

So they are basically killing off any incentive to buy their scanners by showing a lack of long term support for their previous models, products which were extremely expensive.

Yet they still make film? Why bother Kodak? You are cutting back on the materials required to process and print from that film, and to even scan from it.

It's only a matter of time before I buy a RED digital camera and print digitally on an Epson. Who needs kodak?

[Bruce M. Herman]

I agree that Kodak's scanner sales folks are pretty lame. But I found difficulties with many of the companies that sell pre-print hardware. That being said, once I got into the company, I had lots of attention by the service folks and my regional service manager.

I have a one year service contract, which is quite expensive, but which I justified at the time because 1) I wasn't familiar with the scanner, 2) I had a service person who lives nearby, 3) many of the people trying to go it alone on the Yahoo hi-end scanner site were spending months trying to resolve issues and 4) I was concerned that the scanner I purchased might have a bad CCD.

I agree that it is frustrating when they discontinue service for a product, but part of the reason may be that spare parts aren't available. It may also be that they aren't receiving sufficient calls to justify continuing support. I'm sitting here with an Eversmart Supreme II that was not cheap, and am wondering what to do in a couple of years when service for it is discontinued. I doubt that I'll continue my service contract beyond the first year unless I land some commercial scanning that justifies having rapid response.

On the negative side, Oxygen has probably seen its last update with 2.6.4, and that involved a feature cut rather than expansion! It would be interesting to know how many Oxygen users are out there. Perhaps Lasersoft/Silverfast would pick up the software end of this market.

Just some ramblings...

[John Kasaian]

I switched over to Ansco 130 some time ago!

[CP Goerz]

'I switched over to Ansco 130 some time ago!'

Have you tried the latest Ansco 130.1? ;-)


One more vote for good riddance, Creo/Scitex/whatever were amazingly expensive and they made plenty of cash from the Co I worked for with the service calls for their faulty and unreliable machinery.