Player One - Great Service

[PeterC65]

I wanted to do a shout out for the great service I've received from Player One in China. I always worry when buying Chinese made gear that doesn't have good UK support, but Player One have been excellent. They do now have a UK based distributor, but I bought my Uranus-C camera when their UK distributor was based in Canada, and in any case it's well out of warranty.

A couple of months ago the central pin of the USB connector snapped. Not sure why, possibly the cable got snagged and pulled at it. I managed to superglue it back as a temporary fix but emailed support at Player One to see if there was anything that could be done (not wanting to buy a whole new camera). For $60 (carriage free) they offered to send me a replacement motherboard which carries the USB connector, plus the associated back plate for the camera. It duly arrived with a video showing how to make the replacement. It was a bit stressful dismantling the camera but all went well and it fixed the USB connector.

Over the last few nights I've noticed more hot pixels than usual and it occurred to me that the hot pixel map that is used by the Dead Pixel Suppression (DPS) technology that Player One cameras have may have been stored in the now replaced motherboard. I emailed Player One support yesterday and overnight they replied with instructions to do a remote session to update the DPS map. First thing this morning (end of Friday in China) that is what we did, and their engineer spent an hour with their setup software recalibrating my camera.

It was interesting to watch the process of DPS mapping and see the before and after. Before there were a few dozen hot pixels dotted across the sensor, afterwards not a single one. Very impressive.

So now my camera is as good as new, thanks to the excellent support from Player One.