Dear Canon

Your products have proven to be acceptable in comparison to most other brands, and though a little pricier than others, you are often going beyond the minimum standard, whereas allot of brands will just get up to the minimum standard that will enable them to make a sale, and often purchaser’s of their gear, will begin to realise their statements about product quality were more clever marketing, than an actuality, and often gear like this which isnt trying very hard will end up on ebay within 2 years or broken and junked within 3 years, leading to a depression in the consumers mind in terms of spending, as it often seems spending on gear in itself is a pointless act as your pretty sure your going to get swindled. This is sometimes due to the fact that often when brands adhere to a standard they fudge or fake reaching it.

examples of this, which no manufacturer should find themselve prone to, might be :

• unformatted capacity being listed as capacity (everyones at it, the EU should legislate against it)
• interpolated resolution being listed as resolution (lots of cheaper brands at this interpolated should become an illegal marketing term)
• number of colours reproducable being fudged ( Apple laptop Lcd’s comes to mind)
• dpi not referring to registerable points of colour rather a point that is used to create a patch of colour. (all printer manufacturers)
• product build quality so low the product dies within two years.(almost all manufacturers guilty of this)
• un-replaceable parts that mean products die early because batterys, print heads or some other part etc cant be replaced. etc(Apple ipods, Epson etc)
• deceptive cost hiding, by discounting one end of the sale and at the same time hiking ongoing costs to make the profits back.(Epson, Lexmark, Hewlett Packard, all mobile phone contracts practically)
• extremely short warranty’s of 1 year etc indicative of manufacturers who have no faith in their outsourced manufacturing.(all manufacturers)
• Storage transfer bridges so cheap that in no way make full use of the potential of a bus speed, that the product is acclaimably sold by, ie drives that claim firewire 800 support or esata etc and are half the speed of other units with a similar claim or have no potential to get any where near saturating the bandwidth of the transfer rate standard, used to sell them, in the case of drives it would be better for the consumer to sell by them by what theyre formatted capacity and what their read and write transfer speeds were rather than plastering them with 800 Mbps when they cant acheive it.(most external HD manufacturers)
• false marketing terms like “HD ready”, hiding under the guise of a supposed standard, which in reality means very little, being used to sell vast swathes of sub standard non 1080p capable televisions into people homes, Thinking theyve just invested in HD, only to be dissappointed, admitadely im too wiley to fall for such shenanigans but many did.
• shoddy 3rd Party supplied additive components of too low a standard, supplied with the named equipment failing, power supply bricks etc (Lacie comes to mind 3 times in my own experience)
• Taking a once quality name and using it to volume sell low quality goods for as long as you can get away with before the customer realises, (sennheiser, karrimor, epson, all wireless router manufacturers).
• Speed specifications being sold by referring to imagined perfect scenarios, rather an average acutality (All broadband providers)
• The word unlimited being used falsely for marketing purposes (Broadband Mobile data providers nearly all)
• EU demands of green lead free solder, having led to a spike in technology product failure rate over the last five years, which the consumer has paid for without realising, as the manufacturers try to find a solder that doesnt lead to dry joint failure on a large scale, such as, has been evidenced. the cost of throwing all this failed equipment away has been a worse environmental disaster than lead being in the solder in the first place.
• Manufacturers who having made design and manufacturing flaws, seem increasingly incapable and unresponsive to make product recalls, and own upto their mistakes and re-imburse the customer, and often only making recalls/extended warranty programs in regions where the customers are litigious and have the enregy to setup class action lawsuits( ie america ) (Apple Ibook motherboards in general, batch of lombard motorola cpu’s not working with mac os x only sorted in america.

• drives being sole with one brand on the outside, whereas the component that matter that are on the inside are not in the specification, ie what drive or number of is inside an external hard drive case is more important than what brand is on the outside.