Ouch! Steep lens repair bill

[davidc]

I've just received a quote from Fixation to repair my 10-22mm lens - it only focuses to infinity at 22mm for some reason - and it's come back as £300!
A brand new one is only £450... seems awfully steep!

Does anyone know of/recommend other lens repair people, preferably in London?

[Mike Farley]

Try giving Reg a call at Croydon Photo Centre.

[davidc]

His site is blocked at work for "malicious content"! Must have gotten blacklisted somehow... Will check on my way home from work.

[Mike Farley]

Must be all that Leica stuff!

[Mike Farley]

Did you manage to get your lens repaired at a reasonable cost or are you still investigating the options?

[davidc]

Heh I forgot about this. After I got the quote I called around and was ready to take it to the chap in Croydon you recommended but left this too late and had to wait until I returned from Prague.

After picking it up from fixation I couldn't resist trying it again and surprisingly, it's now absolutely back to normal and working as well as before. I can only assume that in taking it to bits to fix it, when reassembling whatever misalignment was there was "accidentally" fixed and it's producing results like it was beforehand.

So it's "fixed" and for free!

Although I can't guarantee Fixation had tested again after reassembling, so they could well not have known it was fixed, I still found it surprising that they wanted to charge me £350 for a lens which was fixed already. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that they didn't know their tinkering sorted the problem out.

[Mike Farley]

Result!