...and back it goes

At least it was quick. I knew I was going to be disappointed with the Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 from the first moment I looked through the lens in Live View. It just lacked the crispness of my other lenses (not counting the Tokina fisheye, which is even less sharp).

From there it got worse. Most of my first days' shots at long focal distances were out of focus. That night I did an autofocus test at close range, and it was erratic enough to miss critical focus in the center more than half the time. Even worse, the slightest misfocus made the corners terribly blurry. Especially the right side: the lens was decentered. I looked through my other photos, and confirmed the verdict. I shot more photos the next day, and saw the same thing. In fact, only when the right side has been very close to the camera, have I gotten sharp shots wide open on that side. Of course, stopped down all the way to f/11 or f/16, the lens is okay, but it's still not perfect, and I paid for an excellent f/2.8 lens, not a passable f/11 one.

Decentering and poor autofocus accuracy were only the main problems. Strong lateral chromatic aberration as well as mild purple fringing were present in every photo with hard dark-to-bright transitions. Bokeh is absolutely terrible: almost all of the light in the blur circle is concentrated in a thin ring at the edge, making the most nervous bokeh I've ever seen (worse than the Sigma 30mm f/1.4 even). The lens also had the typical third-party manufacturer yellowish tint. Finally, all bright spots (even those that are not quite clipped) haze a significant portion of their surroundings. It's akin to the 50mm f/1.4 wide open.

Granted, most of these things may be attributable to a defective lens, but not all of them. Just goes to show how far from comprehensive were the glowing reviews of this lens from Ken Rockwell and Photozone.de. Only Photozone picked up on the lateral chromatic aberration, and that's the only problem they reported.

Out of six digital cameras, I've returned two for defects and one died of old age (not even three years old). Out of twelve lenses I've purchased, three have been defective, two I've returned for being worse than the kit lens (despite costing 2x-12x as much), one broke from a short drop of a type that didn't even faze my Fuji pocket cam, and one is going back from warranty service to fix the decentering (the Tokina 10-17mm, not the 11-16, which is one of the returned). That's a despicable quality record, and something I've not encountered elsewhere in consumer electronics. Perhaps cameras and lenses are much higher precision instruments than other consumer electronics, but considering the unprecedented profit margins on digital cameras and DSLR lenses, sales in the millions of units per year, and price points an order of magnitude higher than other consumer electronics, camera equipment manufacturers should be doing better than this.

I'm getting sick of it. I won't be replacing this Tokina 11-16 with another ultrawide. Three strikes and ultrawides are out for me. I may still get a backpack, but after getting burned by camera equipment four times in two months, now I'm reluctant to risk $200+ on a new polarizer (the last was a waste of $100). I may not even send my Tokina fisheye in for warranty service, just because I don't want to test it when it gets back, only to find that it's unchanged or worse.

Seriously, for this kind of money (>$6k already for me) and investment in time (most of the last three years of my life), how can camera manufacturers expect us to put up with this much crap too?