"The frustrating thing was, there was nothing I could do. "SYSTEM ERROR" was not even listed in the instruction manual’s "troubleshooting guide." I plugged "coolpix 775 system error" into Google and found this depressing list of user complaints on the Reviewcentre site. Seems that this problem is endemic to this camera."
I had the same experience when my first IBM hard drive crashed. A possibly useful application of the Google and Amazon APIs would be to parse the later product database, then run SKUs through Google queries for "problem" or "error." This is of course a very crude implementation, e.g. a page that says "Enermax power supply: no problem!" shouldn’t be counted as negative feedback. The challenge is to tap all this unstructured data and mine it automatically. Now when I research items I look for potential negative feedback to try and avoid bad surprises.