Originally posted by biz-engineer Really? Don't electronic manufacturers perform accelerated aging tests on their designs before releasing those designs to market?
Would camera manufacturers just put products to market and then see if they need to grow their after sales / repair department depending on the amount of customer returns?
They almost certainly do some testing to ensure that the rate of failure is less than some percentage threshold for the expected amount of use. How well those tests catch every type of failure under every pattern of use is another matter. BTW, Sony's warranty reserves run about 2% of hardware sales so if the average warranty repair costs 50% of the cost of the product, then some 4% of Sony products are failing within the warranty period. (If warranty fixes are cheaper, then the % rate of failure must be higher.)
Ironically, "accelerated aging" tests can totally fail to catch some types of problems. Back the 80s, some hard disks suffered "stiction" in which the disk head became stuck to the platter when the computer was off for a long time. That failure mode could never be detected by accelerated aging test because the failure was caused by non-use! The sticky solenoid problem on some Pentax cameras seems to be a kind of stiction issue, too. Casual users put their camera away for days/weeks/months at a time during which the solenoid grows sticky.