I hate to say this, because what John is saying actually makes a lot of sense logically speaking... however in practice I've bought three refurb items, and have had problems with all three.
The 1st item was a mini DV video recorder I bought in the late 90's/early 2000's... I purchased it online for $500 bucks refurbished, it was a $2000 dollar video camera new, so I couldn't pass up $1500 in savings! It worked great for about 9 months and then it just up & quit one day. It only came with a 3 month warrantee, and nobody locally could work on the thing. So anyway, that $500 went up in smoke.
The 2nd item was a full screen, double din, Kenwood car stereo DVD/CD player. I got it for a cool $750, and it too cost around $2000 brand new!!! A little over a year after I bought it the DVD/CD player stopped working. Same story with the warrantee/shops willing to work on it. So now I have an excellent $750 dollar radio in my car.
And lastly when my Maxtor R.A.I.D. Memory back-up storage unit went out last summer we had to get a recovery team to get our pictures off of the disks, which cost us $1800 clams. Then as a replacement they ended up sending us a refurbished unit to back our files up on. We didn't ask for a refurb unit, nor did I ok them to send us a refurbished unit, they just sent it to me anyway. So it lasted about 4 months, then at the end of December it completely crapped out on us. And when I say completely I mean my computer can't even see it as an external drive anymore, it's completely fucked!!! Thank God we had all our pictures backed up on yet another hard drive (we learned from that first debacle), so we didn't have to pay for another recovery. But that hard drive is completely gone.
So that's 3 for 3 we struck out on. I'm sure there are those with the exact opposite results when buying refurb equipment without an problems out of it what-so-ever. And if that's you, then more power to ya, I'm happy for you. But my experience with refurbished merchandise hasn't been good up to this date and time.
And although you can save TONS of money with refurb stuff, I won't spend my money on anything that isn't brand new and in the original box anymore. I've simply been burned too many times. I hate to have a negative attitude about something like that, but we can't always chose the hand we're dealt in life....
And no I'm not preaching to anyone else about what they should or should not do, I'm simply stating my own opinion about refurbished stuff.
