Would you pay extra for ultimate QC?

Robin Casady wrote:

My armchair speculation: Let's imagine that Nikon has five machines that test and calibrate the AF before the cameras ship. This machines would be in the Sendai plant so they were subjected to the eartquake. Nikon did say that the Sendai factory sustained some damage from the quake.

You have a factory where they were trying to get three new models released. Then there is a disaster of horrific proportions. Some employees probably lost their homes. Many are likely to have lost friends or relatives. It is likely that many are traumatized by the event. Some probably left Nikon and moved away. A few may have been killed.

Who knows what it was like at Sendai when they were try to get the new cameras built? Did they loose key people and had to replace them with less experienced people? Were key people so traumatized that they couldn't concentrate properly? Hard to know, but it seems possible, even likely.

Given all that, I can imagine it possible that one of those machines did not get properly repaired/calibrated. If that happened, 20% of the cameras would have been set up improperly. Some of them that were out of alignment might have seemed to be in alignment. The calibration numbers for each AF point would not have been right.

The AF system deals with tiny tolerances. It doesn't take much to throw focus off when shooting at f/1.4 or f/2.8.