Lens Defect Survey

LINK

Pentax is running last at the moment so please add your findings.

That's an odd survey, but at least they admit that the results are highly doubtful.

Rubbish as a survey as anybody can deliberately skew the results by clicking on any make.

Well Pentax seem to be as good as Canon and nearly as good as Nikon. But maybe my results have up the percentages - I've never had a bad Pentax lens. Not had a bad Sigma one either for that matter.

When I posted last night there had been 150ish Pentax responses and we were behind Canon, Nikon, Sony and Olympus.

Not so bad now

Well I've added my 3 Pentax lenses - all 100%

Dave

I've lost track of how many new pentax lenses I have bought - many dozens for sure. I have never had a faulty one.

Two of the six new Pentax lenses I've bought in the last five years have been faulty.

I've bought 13 Pentax lenses in the last 5 years, had 3 faulty ones (2 of one design, 1 of another), I did find a batch of one model that had high variance when I tested them in store, 4 out of 5! Some designs appear more prone than others.

Also had 5 Sigmas, all faulty , 3 Tamrons, none faulty !

I recently tried 5 Tamrons of one design, one was very good, the rest were poor with a wide variance. I also tried a Sigma 150-500 which was very good. - I think that it is very much luck of the draw, especially with new designs that are in their first 6-12 months of release, updates usually (but not always ) have a much lower incidence of faults.

Having recently made the mistake of not checking a product carefully at the time of purchase , I now check my actual unit of any precision or electronic product "in store" beforehand, as the cost of return, or travelling back and forth, can be very significant. I have made a blind online purchase recently (a D-Xenon 100mm macro), luckily it was okay.

Nearly neck and neck with Canon when I added my 50% failure rate to the survey.

This is as it stands at the time of my post:

Survey Results
Note: Values are greyed out if there are less than 300 lenses sampled

Canon lenses - 12002 with 905 defects
The probability of getting a good lens is 92 %
The probability of getting 5 Canon lenses in a row is 68 %

Sigma lenses - 2624 with 579 defects
The probability of getting a good lens is 78 %
The probability of getting 5 good Sigma lenses in a row is 29 %

Tamron lenses - 1300 with 201 defects
The probability of getting a good lens is 85 %
The probability of getting 5 good Tamron lenses in a row is 43 %

Tokina lenses - 428 with 69 defects
The probability of getting a good lens is 84 %
The probability of getting 5 good Tokina lenses in a row is 42 %

Nikon lenses - 2182 with 171 defects
The probability of getting a good lens is 92 %
The probability of getting 5 good Nikon lenses in a row is 66 %

Pentax lenses - 1035 with 77 defects
The probability of getting a good lens is 93 %
The probability of getting 5 good Pentax lenses in a row is 68 %

Minolta/Konica/Sony lenses - 582 with 60 defects
The probability of getting a good lens is 90 %
The probability of getting 5 good Minolta/Sony lenses in a row is 58 %

Other lenses - 841 with 89 defects
The probability of getting a good lens is 89 %
The probability of getting 5 good Other lenses in a row is 57 %

It would seem that Pentax has the best rating at 93% probability of getting a good one.

Ah, I can go off to work now in the knowledge my work is done.

This survey has no fidelity.

Niklas

I've bought 7 "new" lenses in the last 5 years, 6 Pentax and 1 Tamron. All have worked perfectly so I've added those in.

I would suspect that these results are very skewed. The idea that out of 5 lenses at best the chance of one of them being faulty was as high as 40% is dreadful.

I can see that with the complexity of modern lenses the chance of a fault must be higher than with a manual focus lens, but even so....

And then we see the Sigma result...