About two years ago now, I bought a Hanns.G HG281DP 28" LCD monitor. It came with a three-year warranty.
About three or four months ago, it started developing an intermittent problem.
About four weeks ago, I got an RMA for it under warranty, and about three weeks ago I got a spare CRT monitor freed up, packed up the LCD carefully in its original packaging, complete with the screen protector sheet carefully taped in place with masking tape that releases cleanly without leaving residue, and shipped it off for repair.
It came back today, in a plaim brown carton, wrapped in about thirty yards of bubble pack. Original packaging missing. Screen protector sheet missing. The end of the bubble pack was taped to the face of the monitor with packing tape, which I had considerable difficulty removing and which left a wad of adhesive residue that it has taken twenty minutes of scrubbing with a shop towel and 99% isopropanol to remove.
The intermittent fault I sent it in for does indeed appear to have been fixed. It's been replaced with a fault that's present all the time. Everything is heavily tinted green. White is greenish. Grey is greenish. Yellow is yellow-green. Even black is green-tinted.
They've issued a new RMA, to include a prepaid shipping tag and an order to exchange for a tested replacement unit upon receipt ... but it'll be gone for another couple of weeks of using my spare monitor, during which it'll be hard to get anything done. Subsequently, I've found that I can get bright areas of the screen mostly adjusted to normal, but dark areas are still noticeably green-tinted. What I need to decide is whether this is acceptably correct. I hate to have my big monitor gone for another couple of weeks, but they did send it back to me not working properly, and they are supposedly covering the return shipping.
(Oh, speaking of adjsutment, the firmware on the new mainboard they installed does not offer the typical set of numeric color temperature settings. Instead, it offers vague "warm", "cool", and "nature" — whatever the hell that's supposed to mean — settings, plus "user".)
To be fair, Hannspree customer service was very apologetic about the tape, and explained that they don't keep the packaging monitors arrive back in because it's usually pretty beaten up by the time they receive it. Still, if they'd said that up front in the packing instructions — "DON'T use your original monitor packaging if you want to keep it, because we will not save it" — I'd have used a different box. Instead, they explicitly tell you to use your original monitor packaging, if you still have it. Then they throw it away.
I am, in general, not pleased.
