Yes, the special FREE repair programme works very smoothly "but" totally dependant on where a person may reside, as although in the US no great problems have ever really been experienced by anyone who qualified to receive the repair, however unfortunately the same could be said for other areas, Canada being one of them followed by the UK, New Zealand and Australia. Although admittedly in recent times (in the last year) this situation has somewhat improved, prior to that legitimate (qualifying) owners had, to use the expression "jump through the hoop" and be put to no end of trouble to obtain the repair, basically because that although the JVC (HQ) had made an agreement with Sony (who supplied the faulty modules) to have them subsidise the repairs this agreement with Sony did not appear to have been passed on to offices in other areas / countries, making it whereby owners who approached JVC in these areas were in many cases refused a repair unless paid for. The problems experienced by people outside of the US was really caused right from the very start by a very "low profile" admission by JVC that a manufacturing problem had shown up in a large range of camcorders they had produced, the profile being so low that even customer service staff in various countries offices outside of the US were unaware of the problem.