Lens Repair Data 2.0

A while back, at the request of several customers, we released our lens repair statistics through the summer of 2008, and later updated them for Canon lenses only through October of 2008. Nothing we’ve done since our lenses were used to shoot the Hooters calendar has generated so much response. A lot of people appreciated having the data available. A few brand-name fanboys took our numbers very personally or thought we had an agenda. In response to that I’d like to make clear that we do not care what you rent: our prices figure in the same profit margin per dollar invested if you rent a Nikon 500 VR or a Lensbaby for Canon.

Many of our customers are renting lenses to decide if they want to make a purchase of that item. They can read reviews, they can try it out by renting it, but we still get asked almost daily “I read online that some guy tried three copies before he had one that was sharp”, “I heard they break a lot”, etc. The usual forum post ends up being a series of “I had 3 of that brand, they were all great”, “I had one that sucked and another one that was good”. Not terribly useful unless you try reading several hundred posts.

We’re in the unique position of taking care of over 1,000 regularly used lenses and as far as I know we’re the only ones willing to comment on failure rates. While not a scientific study, we think its helpful that we can tell you “We’ve had 121 copies of the Canon 70-200 f/2.8 IS, used on average 30 weeks each, and the repair rate was 4% compared to our average repair rate of 5.5%”. For those of you interested, I’d also suggest looking at the Lens Defect Survey at LensPlay. Again, its not scientific but has responses from over 4,000 users so its a large series.

OK, on to the updated data. This list has repair data for all of our lens brand (not just Canon) that had repair rates over 10% through November 30, 2008. Some numbers have changed a bit more than you might expect. In large part this is because we added some more stringent testing (as we learn from our mistakes) that has caught a number of focusing issues we might have missed before. As a result we had a larger number of repairs in October and November than we’ve ever had. We’ve also had one new lens (the Tamron 70-200 f2.8) that had a large failure rate and got on the list rather quickly. Historically, Tamron has had a low failure rate for us and we were an early adopter of this lens (all of our copies came from the initial shipments, we believe) so I’m not sure if the lens really has problems or we got a bad batch.

There are three reasons a lens is not on the list:

• We don’t carry it. Hence we have no comments on the Sigma 24-70 f2.8, Canon 18-55 EF-S, and a number of other lenses because we don’t carry them.
• We carry the lens but have fewer than 9 copies of it and therefore don’t feel any comment on reliability is appropriate (all Olympus, Zeiss and Sony lenses fit in this category, as well as most specialty lenses like tilt-shifts).
• We carry the lens in quantity and the failure rate is less than 10% per year. If we stock the lens, it isn’t in the ‘low copy’ category mentioned above, and its not on this list, then its failure rate is NOT high in our experience.

Just because we get asked it a lot, I’ll add that the Supertelephoto primes (300 f2.8, 400 f2.8, 500f4, 600 f4 from both Canon and Nikon) are our lowest repair rate lenses. Basically we’ve only had damage repairs for any of them.

Oh, and one last note: several people have emailed and asked about failure rates for camera bodies. We don’t think they’re very meaningful in this discussion for the simple reason that our body failures, which are more frequent than lens repairs, almost always occur after shipping, not during use. Our conclusion is that camera bodies, stuffed with an amazing amount of electronics, suffer from the shock damage that occurs during shipping much more than from actual use.