2 hour old Summicron 35mm ASPH focus ring sticking?!

[lct]

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After 30+ years of use of dozens lenses, i never believe people claiming that stiff focusing is normal. No it is not normal if other lenses than yours have a smooth focusing as any Leica lens should have. I don't believe people claiming that it is normal for the user to do the job of the camera maker either. It is not up to us customers to run-in lenses in place of the camera maker. I made the mistake once with a Summilux 50/1.4 asph. I tried to run it in myself and the result was that the lens developed some play.

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[roydonian]

2 years ago we had our pelican case go missing from the airplane to the hotel. Long story short, we grabbed 1 D3 and 3 Nikkor lenses from a local shop to replace our missing secondary. All worked fine and we put around 1k photos over the winter weekend of the snowboard comp.

 

It never even came to our mind they would have issues and if they did... A simple swap to the half dozen other boxes would fix then issue.

 

That sums up one aspect of what quality control should all be about – making sure the product is not faulty when it reaches the customer.

 

Back in the late 1960s, I read an account in a hi-fi magazine of why a UK dealer had decided to start stocking Japanese brands. This seemed a strange move in the days when most British hi-fi enthusiasts used British equipment, but the dealer in question had found that Japanese equipment was almost always fault-free when unpacked, while the faulty-as-delivered rate for British equipment was poor. I can’t remember the figures he quoted, but recall thinking that they were abysmal.

 

Within a decade, many long-established British hi-fi companies of the era were history.

 

Best regards,

 

Doug

(who still has British hi-fi)