jonoslack
Active member
HI ZoranN,
#1 It is not a rant, it's a discussion, if I was actually ranting it would be very obvious, trust me.
#2 I am glad to hear you are familiar with statistics, thus you should know why this is not a sample set of 5. You can also consider following: What is there to assure us sample set it not much bigger but we just didn't hear about it? What makes you confident that we didn't hear about it because owners do know how to test for it, did test it, and it did pass the test? Could it be that people are having them without being aware there is an issue? Wouldn't be the first time.
Look at it this way -
About 10 years ago I took 5 successive copies of the Nikon 17-55 lens back to a professional camera supplier in Cambridge - they quietly replaced them, agreeing with my samples that it was definitely not OK (I wasn't familiar with the term 'decentered' then, but I sure knew what 'soft' meant )
When I finally got a good one, I asked their Nkon specialist if they often got lenses returned from customers - he said that I was the only person that year who had returned one.
Of course, I can't prove it, but it seems likely that there were lots of sub-standard lenses going out (or at least less than optimal). It's just that people weren't looking, added to which, back then, most pros were using film, and it was less easy to realise.
Whatever - I have quite a lot of statistics as well, and as N says - these are not statistical samples.
In this case lots of people are buying these new lenses, and they have been warned about sample variation and are looking for it.
Back to Roger Cicala's excellent article at lens rentals: All of these lenses vary quite widely in quality, and they are all going to be decentered to a greater or lesser degree - only you can decide what you find acceptable, but I'd be really surprised if Sony's QC was worse than others (especially since long personal experience (not statistically significant sadly) has shown me how reliable their cameras seem to be).
all the best