After nearly two weeks of posts, comments, complaints and other unpleasant correspondence with the folks at elgato about my EyeTV 250 problem, I ended up having to troubleshoot and repair the issue myself. After repeat emails from Andrea Lindgren of elgato’s tech support offering no help, but asking for my date of purchase, I finally started posting issues on the eyetv lounge in hopes that someone would respond, or at least read about the trouble I was having. This seemed to start getting results. However, one of the results was a response from another woman in elgato sales dept, Kathleen, who basically told me I was screwed. Actually what she said was
Your case has been passed to me by Andrea of technical support.
There is a one year warranty on all Elgato items. We are unable to offer out of warranty replacements. There is no repair program for these devices, they are serviced by exchange.
I am sorry for this inconvenience.
Kathleen
Elgato Systems
And basically, that tells me that I’m just screwed. It tells me that I spent over $200 on some electronics that is useless if anything breaks because they won’t lift a finger to help a customer. Once you’ve given them your money, you are no longer of interest to them and you’re on your own.
Unwilling to accept this solution, I took out my little mult-meter and began to test the hardware to find out why the receiver was not getting any power. I tracked the problem down to the AC power supply, a simple little device that plugs into the wall and supplies power to the receiver and probably costs around $10. I just happened to have a couple spares that came with old cell phones that I no longer use, so I swapped the ends out between the broken one and an old phone power supply, plugged it in and everything worked just fine.
After finding and fixing the problem, I got back on the eyetv lounge and posted my findings and complaints. One of their more helpful individuals, Nick Freeman, from elgato’s Customer Support department, actually helped me get things worked out and had a new replacement AC power adapter sent out to me.
So in the end, I’m not sure if elgato would have done anything at all had I not found and fixed the problem myself, and told them exactly what was wrong and what I needed to resolve my issues. I will say to their credit though, that they have at least one individual, Nick Freeman, who is willing to do what it takes to make a customer feel like he’s not completely alone with broken equipment. Since this last incident happened, I’ve been researching other products for watching TV on a computer and there are at least a couple to choose from. It remains to be seen if their support is any better than elgato’s, but they sure as hell can’t be much worse.