Went to a rental house in Seattle and saw a bunch of cameras with cracked mirror boxes

I was at Glazer's in Seattle last week checking out a used body and the tech there showed me three different Canon 5D Mark IVs all with the same cracked mirror box problem. One side of me thinks this is just bad luck or heavy use, the other side thinks it's a design flaw Canon should've addressed. Has anyone else seen this pattern on the Mark IV specifically or am I reading too much into it?

2 comments

2 Comments

shah.evan3d ago

Yo, I actually READ a deep dive on this from a repair blog a few months back. They tore down a Mark IV and found the mirror box casting has these thin stress points near the pivot area, and over time with heavy use or a hard drop they just crack along those lines. The blog guy said it's a known issue in certain serial number batches, not every camera, but common enough that Canon quietly updated the part in later runs. So yeah, I lean toward it being a design flaw they half fixed rather than bad luck.

nina8343d ago

Oh, that's really interesting. I wonder if those thin stress points are actually from Canon trying to shave weight off the body without fully testing how it holds up over years of use. It makes you think whether the later quiet fix was just a band-aid or a real redesign.