I purchased a 5D near the end of 2007 and have been having focusing issues with my 70-200 4.0 IS L. Note this is a lens which performs flawlessly on my 30D - razor sharp at all focal lengths, apertures and distances. But on my 5D images taken with this lens on a tripod at 200mm at a distance of 30 ft. are soft. In addition, images taken with my 17-40 L appear to be soft as well. So I brought my 5D and my complete lens kit into Canon for calibration. The results look to be no better if not worse. I have a hard time believing they did anything. I am so sick of Canon's sub-standard quality control. There are blatant discrepancies in the performance of the same lens on different bodies and inconsistency in sharpness between different copies of the same lens. I have made a sizable investment in Canon equipment, but I am so frustrated that I am ready to sell it all off and start over with Nikon. I am going to give Canon one more shot to get it right, but if they can’t that is just what I am going to do. This stuff is way too expensive for me to have to continually worry if the camera or my lenses are performing up to spec. I want my equipment to work right every time – at least most of it. Is it just me or does anyone else feel this way?
That's why I'm happy to see Nikon is in the FF DSLR business and hope they'll capture 25% or more of Canon's share of the market. Competition is good for the consumers.
Agree - send it back and complain, although it's easy for me as I live near to my local Canon service centre (and the receptionist knows me by name now ...)
One big improvement in the 1DIII and 1DsIII is you can adjust this yourself. This has saved me a fortune as every time I bought a new body it was off to Canon with the whole kit for re-adjustment ... shouldn't happen now.
I understand your frustration. Let's check a few things just to make sure there is not a computer or technique issue here.
Are you shooting RAW on both the 30D and the 5D? (Want to make sure you are not shooting JPEG on the 30D with in-camera sharpening).
Are you sure that you are applying the same post-processing settings to both the 30D and 5D images?
Also, for your test methodology, you need to do it this way:
Does the 70-200 4L come with a tripod collar? Mount the lens on a tripod using the tripod collar. Take photos using a timer or remote release. Then switch bodies and repeat.
I have to knock wood, I've been lucky so far with the Canon gear that I've purchased. The only exception to that is my 17-55 lens. It started collecting an unacceptable amount of dust inside before it was even 6 months old. I sent it in to Canon ($40 out of pocket to ship it insured) and had it come back with dust removed, but a big piece of lint dead center inside the lens. Canon sent me a prepaid UPS label to send it back, but then I got an e-mail that the cleaning was going to cost me $87. I had to call and argue with them over the phone about it. They ended up doing it without charging me, but that left a bad taste in my mouth. I sold the lens days later.
I do remember being outraged when I first discovered this phenomenon in the early days of digital.... It had never occured to me that lenses even needed to be calibrated for focus.
It turns out that back or front focus issues are rather common, and not just with Canon gear. I recently was in Yellowstone with another pro who is a long-time Nikon user and his litany of such issues was longer than mine (not that this proves anything).
I suspect the root cause here is that digital is much more revealing of minor discrepancies than film ever was (both because of greater resolving power and because it is much easier to pixel peep), and as a result, the tolerances for both bodies and lenses must be tighter.
CPS has never failed to fix such issues for me, although one case (a 24L) came back from service worse than when I sent it in. I simply asked them to redo it, and it was returned in perfect order.
Is this evidence of poor quality control, or does it simply reflect the reality that modern AF equipment is much more complex and interdependent than manual gear? Probabaly there's a bit of both going on, but Canon users are not alone in suffering from this.
agree with gary here. i myself have sent and resent lenses several times to canon until they got it right. my experience is as follows:
1. canon will eventually get it right. just be patient and send the lens and whatever else they request (body, etc.) back until they get it fixed. this could be frustrating sometimes because of time lost (i should know, i have sent back lenses to them 4-5x before they got it fixed correctly).
2. there are minute tolerance levels for modern lenses and bodies. in general, you should get a good copy with an acceptably good tolerance level when you buy a new lens and put it on your body. however, there is the occasional case where the tolerance levels are somewhat off and you'll have some kind of focus/softness problem. i think canon realizes that most of the softness/calibration problems are simply due to slight tolerance differences and can simply be remedied by a microadjustment feature on your body and that's why they added this feature to their newest bodies. my guess is that if they put this microadjustment feature into all their future bodies, then a lot of calibration requests/complaints will go away. i know they can do this but it's just a matter of whether they will add it or not on the non-1D bodies. i own a 1D2N and a 1DS2 and although i don't have direct access to the microadjustment feature, i know that both bodies have this ability because i recently requested them to do this on my 70-200 where my 1D2N was backfocusing but was very sharp on my 1DS2.
3. tolerance level problems seem to be magnified more with the longer lenses. of all my zooms, only the 70-200 took a while for them to get right. the shorter zooms seem to be easily fixed/calibrated even without me sending my body to them.
Binh Ly wrote:
1. canon will eventually get it right. just be patient and send the lens and whatever else they request (body, etc.) back until they get it fixed. this could be frustrating sometimes because of time lost (i should know, i have sent back lenses to them 4-5x before they got it fixed correctly).
Maybe some of you CPS members can live with this, but having sent my 5D back twice (paying $60 in postage and insurance each time) for warranty repairs that were never fixed, I can't. I have about $12,000 invested in Canon gear (probably just a drop for you pro's) and I WAS going to buy a 1Ds3 body and a few more high-end lenses but I've decided to just stop buying Canon gear until the quality control and honesty improves.
I'm not flaming anyone else - that's my experience and my opinion.
harry, i do understand your frustration. i myself have cursed them many times. not that it matters but i'm just an amateur and not a cps member. all this is just a (money-pit) hobby to me. i think that canon does have a solution (cameras and lenses) that fits almost every need at every price point and that's the appeal of their offering. because of their success, they probably started to relax/sleep a little bit too much and now they are starting to realize that competition is catching up. i do not deny that their qc is imperfect but i have learned to accept that investing in canon requires patience in this area.
i doubt that these problems do not exist for other non-canon systems so you'll probably have the same problems there. please understand that i'm not talking about the 1d3, i'm talking about just canon's qc and their lenses in general. i do not own the 1d3 but i wouldn't be quick to judge and generalize the company based on 1 mistake alone (i.e. yeah the 1d3 probably has problems, but that doesn't mean that all their lenses and other bodies and their service are shit too).
Hi everyone.
As a Canon owner for 44 years, and reading and hearing all these stories-iam dam glad Canon didnt build and repair any of the USAF aircraft, i flew for twenty years, six, in VietNam. I agree, they have a quality control problem-they have grown to big for thir pants, so to speak. Several years back, who every heard of all these problems? Lens, bodies, cabalirations, repairs, etc. , please !!I suppose however, they might not be alone.
Cheers
Harry
Years back they used a piece of paper with a hole it in. j/k . Years ago things were much more simplistic, manual focus, manual load.
Canon has made over how many EOS cameras with a small percentage of problems.
And don't tell me about the USAF and the build and repair, the companies that have built many of what the AF flews have had MAJOR problems, major cost overruns. Not really during your time because things were made simpler. Not to mention how many times I had to remove ejection seats because some dillhole pilot can't remember how many pens or pencils he had BEFORE he flew.
Edited by monochrome on Mar 05, 2008 at 10:06 PM GMT
monochrome wrote:
Not to mention how times I had to remove ejection seats because some dillhole pilot can't remember how many pens or pencils he had BEFORE he flew.
Kingfishphoto wrote:
As a Canon owner for 44 years, [...] Several years back, who every heard of all these problems? Lens, bodies, cabalirations
Back in your day, cameras were mechanical, had manual focus, and had grainy 35mm film. Digital systems are more rocket science than the Vietnam era jets you flew, and cost a lot less. Digital sensors are a lot more demanding than grainy film. People are more demanding than ever before, expecting perfect autofocus performance for hundreds of frames per shoot of birds in flight or athletes at 6 or 8 frames per second to produce pictures they blow up to 100 percent on their monitors (equals about 30 x 45 inches scrolled out, about three times the size of any print they made back then). Back in your day, photographers focused manually and anticipated action, and expected to discard quite a few pictures.
Yes, nothing is perfect, not even your "cabalirations".
Ten years ago before the internet proliferation, any QA/QC issues were not discussed on open internet forums but only at meetings of photoclubs. Like what, once a month?
I don't personally work in Quality control, but I'm in purchasing, so I've had exposure to a number of different quality systems up to and including 6 sigma. Canon should be (actually I think they claim to be) a world class company. Their quality should be better than it is. They have the engineering and the capital to make it better. It's not because lenses and digital cameras are complicated either, that just isn't a valid excuse. If Canon really wanted to they could bring their defect rate down to almost nothing. I'm really not sure why they don't make a stronger effort.
^^ You can say this for almost every company, just look at Toyota. Things are getting harder to make and the ratings are going down. This is across the board for almost any company. There people are suppose to build things one way, the cannot check every item to ensure that this is done. That's why every company has a percentage of acceptable levels of quality.
As to my Toyota statement, I know someone might say just look at Hyundai, well they had no build standards to begin with.
AGeoJO wrote:
Ten years ago before the internet proliferation, any QA/QC issues were not discussed on open internet forums but only at meetings of photoclubs. Like what, once a month?
Yes. Instead of having zero or one squeaky wheel in a pool of thirty, we now have the spectacle of about 5,000 to 10,000 squeaky wheels in a pool of 300,000. On their internet soapboxes, they can magnify the seeming frequency of problems out of all proportion. Yes, there are problems, and I sympathize with the people experiencing them and hope I never have to go through that, but given all the years and all the cameras and Canon's market share, ... Every company has stumbles on one product or another, if they make enough models and enough copies. Canon has stumbled on the one camera, but there are many more satisfied owners of that camera than unhappy ones and Canon is still a hiqh quality manufacturer.
Mark Zwiesler wrote:
If Canon really wanted to they could bring their defect rate down to almost nothing. I'm really not sure why they don't make a stronger effort.
The reason? "Effort" does not come free of charge. You would scream if you had to pay Zeiss prices for your Canon gear.
This is, also, perhaps the triumph of the consumer. You see, we're marketed to so heavily, with such lofty language...that now people have become quite sophisticated as consumers, and the digital DIY-age allows us to pick the stuff apart and the internet lets people compare.
So, in short, it's a new kind of camera difficulty for the producers, and a new breed of super-educated/finicky (in a good way) consumer.
So, I'm confident that they'll eventually adjust to the new metric....with better QC as the educated consumer won't tolerate less.
