tiemann

B&H have a term for lenses they don't stock. It's called "special order", and a special property of special order items is "you buy it, you bought it--no returns." For a month now they (and Adorama) have on their site a note saying "this lens is in a back-order situation and we don't know when we'll get more." I cannot imagine these discount brokers offering to special-order a lens and not have "special order" apply to it.

Hmm...seems like there's a new business opportunity for the corner photo store: to hand-test and submit for service all the kit they sell that didn't get done right the first time. Humpf!

Well I just got my 20D last week, took it to school to shoot the Halloween

parade, and most of my pictures were not sharp! The focus accuracy of my

EOS-1v and EOS-3 were deadly sharp, so I decided to do the inclined paper

test.

 

When I manually focus, I find that I do get a sharp picture--which tells me that

my prism/film plane are in good order. When I autofocus, I find that it depends

on the lens. I tested 15 f/2.8 fisheye, ranges of 17-35 f/2.8, ranges of 17-85

EF-S, 35 f/1.4, 35 f/2, 50 f/1.4, 100 f/2.8 macro. The 100 f/2.8 macro was

dead-on. The 35 f/1.4 and 35 f/2 were very close. The 50 f/1.4 was a bit off,

the zooms were more off, and the fisheye was way off. I used only the center

focus spot, and did the tests at f/2 or wide open (if the lens did not do f/2).

 

Ten years ago I switched from manual focus to autofocus because the EOS

620 could focus better than my eyes could. My eyes have gotten worse, and

somehow the 20D has gotten much worse.

 

I did try the domino test, but did not find it easy to set them up in a way that

gave me very testable results.

 

Should I expect better results from the 20D? Should I expect results as good

as my EOS-1v from a 1D MkII?