70-300 Repair Delay?

[kevin_g1]

I called Canon today about sending in my 70-300 f/4-5.6 IS USM for repair. The

rep said that they were putting a hold on repairs until more parts arrived from

Japan (I'm in New Jersey). And promised to call me back as soon as the parts

were in.

 

Anyone else get the same news, or have had a similar experience with delayed

parts before? Any experience with the time of such a delay? And do they really

call you when the parts arrive?

 

Thanks,

Kevin

[agustin.benencia]

Well I'll use this topic to say that my 70-300 was fixed in only three days. According to other posts the lens is now more stable when zooming than before. And the sharpness at 300 in vertical mode increased a lot. So for any other else who lives in Argentina I can tell that LAM Service (Canon official servive here) is a good place for sending your gear.

AGUSTIN

[matthewk]

Same thing here, "we'll contact you when the parts are ready." This was only a few days ago. I hope it doesn't take them too long. I'm in Minnesota, so the NJ repair center is probably where I'll be sending it.

[brucecyr]

I think "parts" means new lenses -- at least that was my experience and that of a few other reports I've seen on-line. While its conceivable they might start "fixing" old models later on, I think its probably cheaper just to replace a lens.

 

Incidentally, my experience suggests a slight but noticeable overall increase in autofocus failure, especially in the landscape mode. But I obviously can't confirm this systematically, so I could be wrong. In any case, usually when there is landscape autofocus failure, I can rotate to portrait mode, get a fix, and then rotate back to landscape mode to shoot -- and vice versa when there is portrait mode failure. Overall, there seem to be more failures with a small central object or in close-up use, but there are other conditions too.

 

To be clear, by "autofocus failure" I mean that the lens cycles entirely thru its focusing range without coming to an autofocus. It stops in an obviously out-of-focus condition, so its perfectly clear to the user what the situation is, unlike the previous problem when it seemed that portrait mode autofocus was achieved but in fact it wasn't.

 

Lets say that if the pre-replacement autofocus failure rate was about 5%, now its about 10% -- and it seems to happen more often in landscape than portrait mode, even allowing for the fact that I shoot more in landscape than portrait mode.

 

BTW, there may some logic to this situation. If we assume that there is a fixed amount of memory in the firmware for the focusing programming, then it may be that some of the memory formerly dedicated to landscape mode was switched to portrait mode. OTOH, maybe there was an excess of unused memory, in which case this suggestion if spurious.

 

Still, I emphasize that this is a subjective impression from a week's sporadic use and may not be a valid finding since I didn't keep track of my actual pre-replacement autofocus failure rate. Also, note that so far all the replaced lenses seem to be far more resistant to zoom creep when the lens is vertically oriented than was previously the case.

 

This lens remains my favorite for "roll-around" use. I'm impressed by Canon's commitment to make things right for those of us who got a defective lens, and even if there is a slight autofocus failure rate I think replacement is worthwhile for those who have the portrait mode autofocus blur problem.

 

Bruce