Datavideo UK support service

Following a recent purchase of a Datavideo DN-200 tapeless digital church video recorder, I had the opportunity of experiencing the support side of Holdan Ltd, the UK distributors of Datavideo equipment.

My local V2V church in Wembley bought the DN-200 so we could digitally record our sunday services thus reducing the time it took to produce our weekly podcasts, but after using it for just 2 sessions, I noticed a problem with the DN-200, it would shut off recording before service was over! Since this was the first time of me as a video producer using datavideo equipment I wasn't sure what to expect when it came to support, I was soon to find out.

My first port of call was to contact the reseller from whom we bought the recorder who advised me to contact Holdan the UK distributor as they had full manufacturer access and a better support infrastructure to deal with any product issues I had.

So on a thursday morning I fired off an email to the technical department at Holdan providing full details of the faulty unit (S/N, firmware version, etc) and the problem I was having. I didn't get any acknowledgement to my email but thought I'd wait a few days, but by monday with no response and not wanting to spend another sunday without a reliable recorder, I decided to call Holdan on the phone.
On getting through to the datavideo support guy, I explained the problem, was advised that if I could get the DN-200 to them by Wednesday, they would either have a relacement unit or get mine repaired and sent back to me by Friday.

To cut a long story short, they had the unit by Wednesday, and I got a replacement unit on Saturday.
What I didn't like about my experience was:

1. My email was recieved by the Datavideo support manager, but was not acted upon or passed to a technician to follow up or investigate.
2. I had to continue to chase them up to find out what was happening to my DN-200 unit, and despite promises to call me back several times I never got a call.
3. There were about 3 different people that I had to deal with, each time I called it was someone new testing the unit in the lab.

Because the DN-200 recorder is a new Datavideo product in the UK, I suspect there were a few teething problems as the quality of datavideo hardware is high, and thus hope to buy more of their units.