To all Steadicam or other Stabilizer owners/operators,
I'm writing this as a warning to all who may be thinking of doing business with Pro Gear from Denmark. What follows is my painful experience which it seems is not unusual from the emails I've received from operators and posts I've read on the Steadicam Forum.
After seeing a Pro Gear SSV1 vest listed on e-bay in mid August I made the mistake of buying it outside of e-bay, because the start bid was too high. I made a lower offer to Jan Schmidt directly and it was acccepted and then paid for by August 30/05. Their only stipulation being that I would have to wait till the conclusion of the IBC 2005 trade show in Amsterdam in mid September, which was fine with me as I still had my old rig which I needed to sell.
In early Oct. I started asking when my vest was being shipped and I was told it's all set to go, ....yeh tomorrow for sure, .... next time we go to the post office etc. I started having bad feelings about this especially when I read some Steadicam Forum posts about other Pro Gear experiemces and my requests for information were still not being answered. I finally got desparate and bombarded them with 20 emails at a time to get their attention and was finally told it had been shipped the first week in November and was given a tracking #. This number turned out to be invalid with Denmark Post and my repeated request for an explanation were ignored for the rest of November. I sold my old rig in the beginning of November expecting the vest to arrive anytime.
I waited patiently but still got no reply from Jan till it got to the point where I said "forget it, I want my money back" but these requests were also ignored. Finally after threatening them with action through the Denmark consumer protection agancy and so on, I received an email in the first week of December saying the vest chassis only had been shipped ( which means he lied about the original shipping!). It was shipped without vest pads and webbing as Jan wanted to give me a new set and it would be sent separately 3 days after the chassis left. I repeatedly asked for a tracking number for the second shipment over the next 2 weeks and got no reply. The vest chassis arrived the day after Boxing Day and I have been waiting for the rest for the pads to show ever since .
Jan refuses to answer my emails and I have been forced to have Rig Engineering here in Australia try to custom build me a set of pads and the support webbing. It is going to cost me $500 AUD to have this done.
Needless to say I am not happy with my Pro Gear experience. They have also cost me more than their vest is worth in lost income over the past two months for without a vest my rig is a very expensive paperweight. They have shown me a total lack of respect and even threatened me with a slander suit if I said bad things about them but that only applies if what's said is untrue. Not in this case!!.
I highly recommend that unless you're prepared to deal with a lot of frustration, lack of communication and maybe not even getting what you bought, DON'T BUY ANYTHING FROM PRO GEAR!
That's just my humble opinion based on my experience. You may have better luck if you still decide to buy from them, I sure hope so!
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Cheers
Norbert
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