Challenging Canon quality control

I understand your POV, but this was a cam that went through their QC TWICE and these major (i.e. not subtle) problems were not caught.

And there is evidence that quite a few, if not the majority, of SX30's were coming off the line with issues. Read through the posts in this forum back when the SX30 had been released, and eager new users were probing its strengths and weaknesses, in even greater detail than they're doing for the SX50 right now. Most if not all of the SX30 users were reporting strong CA/PF. Since a repair/tuneup of my SX30 changed it from strong CA to very mild, it's not a stretch to assume that most of those cameras were defective.