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Review by Jerry Saperstein
Corel has trod a long and rocky road. Way back when, Corel was a pacesetter, its CorelDraw product at the head of the pack. The company was led by a flamboyant entrepreneur who, with his glamorous wife, were regulars on the local high society scene. They are long-gone from the company. Since the high-flying days, the company has lost its dominant position and sometimes struggled for survival. Product quality and customer service deteriorated and I, along with many others, stopped buying or updating Corel products.
Along the way it acquired other brands, such as WordPerfect that had been managed even more poorly. Among them was a one-time shareware program called JASC PaintShop. At one time, PaintShop was actually a challenger to Adobe PhotoShop. Corel also acquired a wonderfully innovative line of PhotoShop plug-ins known collectively as the KPT Collection.
Once sold independently, Corel has not updated KPT products to run with Windows 7 and current versions of PhotoShop.
They are offering the complete collection, however, as a part of PaintShop Pro X4 Ultimate. For the few dollars, because I wanted some of the KPT plug-ins, I ordered PaintShop Pro X4 Ultimate.
Nasty surprise #1: the KPT Collection is not included on the installation discs. You have to register the product after it is installed to get a link to download the KPT product. In my install, the registration page didn’t appear, so I went to Corel’s site and registered the product. The registration site is brain dead. There is a single field for the serial number, so I entered the 28 character code. Then they tell me I must use dashes. There is a word for web design like this: stupid. Tell me before hand to use dashes or give me fields for each 7 digit string.
No mention of KPT. So I go to tech support where I learn Corel generously provides me one tech support call for during my 90 day warranty period, before charging me $19 a question. There seems to be no provision on this page for email support. Uh, this kind of support is essentially worthless.
I did find a page to email them a question. After filling out a dozen or so fields, I hit the Submit button and it tells me the product must be registered in order for me to submit a question. I registered the product already! I try registering the product again and it tells me I have already registered the product.
Duh.
I check my account summary page and - surprise - the product is registered.
In other words, Corel has led me in a circle. I cannot get the KPT Collection without spending still more time with their brain dead website and support function.
Lemme see: what takes less time? Printing out an Amazon return label? Or going through this futile process again?nn Guess which option I’m taking. With customer service like this, Corel is on the road to oblivion, regardless of how good a product like PaintShop Pro X4 Ultimate might be.
Jerry