CompuServe Messages

Lyon Lamb is not out of business. Yet. I am particularly frustrated with a current situation and think that it is appropriate to share it with those on this list. We purchased a MiniVAS about six years ago. We have had our share of problems with it over the years which resulted in many shipping charges and time without a frame controller. It required intervention by one of the owners of the company to finally get our problems resolved in 1990. Now, we find a strange firmware problem which sends images to tape offset by five frames. It's not a fatal sort of thing, since we can simply address the tape taking the offset into account and everything works fine. But it IS a nuisance and may portend future problems not so easily lived with. Anyway, I called Lyon Lamb about it and was informed that it was going to cost a minimum of $400 to get the problem fixed. Plus, I would be without my frame controller for at least two weeks. I know I've owned it a long time, but it DID cost $4400 and we have racked up many hundreds of dollars in repair costs (not to mention lost income when the system was away in California being fixed). One strong reason to consider software over a hardware solution is that software doesn't break. And if it does, you can just reload it from your disks. Lyon Lamb goes out of their way to pooh-pooh software solutions, but how much ya wanna bet they get into it themselves in the next year or two? If it gets to where it is imperitive that we get the frame controller repaired, we have already decided to opt for a software solution instead and sell the MiniVAS "as is".