Are de-kitted lenses more prone to sample variation?

Wasabi Bob wrote:

Impulses wrote:

I can respect your opinion that is based on your assumptions. My comments were based on having visited the facility on more than one occasion. Years ago you had hundreds of workers manning such facilities. Today the production teams are just a few people that basically monitor the quality data. From start to finish, few, if any human hands touch the product. The manufacturing consistency far exceeds what a "human production line" can produce. One of the tests subject the lens to drop tests to measure the specification deviation.

That's a load... Machines aren't perfect, there are always tolerances within the manufacturing process even when it's automated. Not that shipping couldn't exacerbate things, but there are most definitely bad samples coming off the line. They've just decided it's within their acceptable losses and you can bet they've done the math on returns etc.

No assumptions, just evidence of decentered lenses from every manufacturer left and right along with bad warranty service that doesn't even test them properly before sending em back, it's widely documented.

I can't respect that you bought the line of b.s. they fed you at your factory tour, sorry... Just because machines are involved doesn't mean the lenses are indistinguishable from each other or that there aren't some that are visibly worse.

Machines aren't perfect, even high end silicon (sensors, CPU, etc) can often have pretty low yields and the tolerances there are way smaller than with something mechanical like a lens. In fact because the tolerances are wider and because most people don't test their gear is that they can get away with sloppier QC.

I love me some Panasonic btw, I own 4 Panasonic lenses and I've bought 7 (rest were gifts, 9 if you count kit lenses sold or not in use)... But I'm also not oblivious to reality or about to shift all blame to the UPS man.