Thanks for responding. Happy holidays also. Many people here will cast a broad based opinion without anything beyond their personal single brand experience. My wife's Nikon FM2n is still functioning perfectly, as is my first SLR, a Zenit E. Mostly I've use Canon - my AE-1 and T90 - still work well, so I haven't needed to call on service. I did have a good experience with Canon when I bought a refurbished 80D. It seemed to be behaving erratically, but after some experimenting I worked out that it was the battery that was bad. I called Canon, they listened to the problem and my test procedure, and said no problem, we'll ship you a new one.

The only really bad service experience I've had was with an expensive Lenovo laptop, I won't go into the details, but the company was unresponsive from the beginning, not at just the service level but also the top executive level where I had access and a publishing platform. They didn't care. On the other hand I've found Dell to be pretty responsive, especially when you copy the right executive in a polite e-mail. No company is perfect, but Dell does seem to care about customer satisfaction more than many I have had experience with.