Saitek X52 Flight Control System Review

Overall Rating

cheap

RMA policy, manufacturing and software quality

The worst part of the X52 is Saitek's RMA policy, which I suspect any purchaser of the X52 stands about a 25% chance of experienceing first hand.

Saitek's RMA policy is as follows: "Turnaround time for exchanges/repairs is 10 business days after we receive the unit at our offices. Replacement/Repaired units are shipped back via UPS Ground(typically takes 7-12 business days)."

This means that should something go wrong with your stick, you will be without your stick for around a month (the week it takes the stick to get to them, the 2 weeks they take get the stick back in the mail to you, and the week the stick spends in the mail on its return trip).

Further, during this entire process, Saitek cannot easily provide you any insight into where in their process your stick is, or even if they've received it. If you want to know what's happening with your stick, you will have to call them, make a request for information, and then wait 24-48 hours (and by that I can only assume they mean 1 to 2 business days) to see if your request was, in fact, honored.

As far as your chances of experiencing this situation, I don't have any hard numbers on which to base my estimate of 25%. However, this is the second Saitek stick I've purchased that has had a switch die on me, meaning that this has happend to 100% of the Saitek sticks I've owned. This is compared to the 0% of the switches that have died on me on the 4 CH Products controllers I've owned.

In addition to those particularly bad experiences with Saitek sticks, you might want to consider these experiences, too:
. The fact that the latest set of drivers released by Saitek to Microsoft Update don't work, and are a pain to roll back (Personal experience. The fact that you occasionally have to unplug and plug back in the X52 to get it to work (Personal experience)

Finally, you should consider what you're getting. The features of the Saitek stick and supporting software really pale in comparison when up against CH Products' complete set of offerings. True, the Saitek stick is either half the price (or less) of the complete set of CH Products' controllers, but you're likely to never have to return your CH Products controller (or if you do, CH Products makes a concerted effort to get the stick back to you as quickly as possible.
All in all, I'd really like to have the $130 I blew on the X52 back so I could either give it to CH Products, or go buy something from Beta Innovations.com.