My 3 month old dvd/video player has developed snow which fades out to entire picture loss on the video. Naively I called the well-know box-shifting warehouse where I bought it hoping I could get it replacement. Apparently the guarantee means they will send it away for repair, cannot say how long it will take to get back and (the manager told me), "we have legal protection as well as the consumer"! This customer-facing response was merely in reply to my request asking if they could just give me a new machine as this was so new.
AFAI can make out, the situation is indeed as they say: no requirement to change it - just repair it. Oh well, live and learn I suppose. I sort of hoped an "unfit for purpose" argument might apply - it seems not.
Ok I can live without a video machine, but somehow I have little confidence in any "repair" these places could do on a pretty delicate item such as a video recorder. I had thoughts of not getting it back for months then it wouldn't be fixed properly, then sending it back etc etc.
Faced with the above I decided to run a dreaded video head cleaning tape (we grind to destruction) through it. Yes these are evil sporn of the devil things but as I have zero confidence in getting it fixed anyway before tape is entirely obsolete, I did it anyway. Almost everything worked fine *except" for *any tape* from a brand new batch of *** tapes which would always produce the symptoms above. Bought a differnet batch of tapes - they all work fine!