Anyone else had problems with poor Canon quality control on lenses lately?

I've had two (2) problem lately on NEW purchases.

1.) Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM lens with scratches on internal element and also quite dirty (dust, something) inside the lens on various elements.

2.) Canon EF 70-200 f/4 L USM lens with focus problems on EOS 630 and also scratches on internal element. BTW the EOS 630 works fine with all my other Canon EF lenses including two lenses purchased at the same time.

How 'bout it, something going on with QC at Canon?

Regards

-- S Ratzlaff (ratzlaff@ticnet.com), July 28, 2001

Answers

i havent had any problems, personally, with 28-105 and 50mm lenses that i've bought. however, i hear lots of stories about brand new lenses, even L lenses, having stuff in them. I think it must be extremely difficult (not impossible) to keep every visible speck of dust out during manufacture. as far as i know, most retailers have been more than willing to exchange new lenses, even multiple times, until you get one that satisfies. theyll keep the other ones for someone with lower standards (:

-- peter bg (pbg333@hotmail.com), July 28, 2001.

During the last 20 years, I’ve owned dozens of lenses from Canon, Nikon and Sigma. They all had dust or other particles inside when I purchased them. The Sigmas were the worst in this respect. Many lenses had bubbles in the glass. One even had a fingerprint inside! I wasted time obsessing over this, holding each lens up to the light to view the imperfections and thus boil and twitch. I considered disassembly and cleaning. However, I soon that realized with each day more dust was entering--especially zoom lenses and those that focus by front element extension--and cleaning would be endless. Anyway, a little dust doesn’t impact image quality very much.

Now I rarely look inside my lenses. I’d rather not know the awful truth. Life is too short for this. I just shoot and enjoy.

-- Puppy Face (doggieface@aol.com), July 29, 2001.

I ordered an EOS3 and three 'L' lenses back in March. Out of the order I had to return the EOS3 for a defective flash exposure compensation level indicator and a 300f4 lens due to a spasmatic condition that prevented it from autofocusing properly. I was rather surprised.

-- Joe Austin (jaus@concentric.net), July 30, 2001.

My 28-105 has something larger than a dust spot inside and I donīt know if it was there since day one or if it crawled inside after a while, probably the second. But someone told me that if the particle isnīt in the same plane as the film it wouldn apear in the picture, and that I could test by sticking a small piece of paper to the front element and take a picture to see. After shooting one roll of bw film with an aperture of 27 and a bright background I have noticed a blur on the negative in the same spot, frame after frame, after asking the store if it could be the particle in lens the guy at the store guaranteed me that it couldnīt be the lens and was probably something in the camera, and it was, I put the camera (an eos50) in bulb an it had a hair stuck under the mirror (almost in the same plane as the film), my point beeing, it only appeared on the picture with the lens all stopped down. I agree with one of the last posts that we should not obsess over every little thing inside our lenses and rather get out and shoot more. BTW, thatīs not a Canon problem, you also hear stories about all the other brands, like the story of the thumbpad on the F100, lots of complains. Maybe a lot of high tech has a lot of room for failure.

-- Christian Koenenkamp (koenenkamp@uol.com.br), August 03, 2001.