Great topic!

AGAINST

If manufacturers can be bothered doing proper quality control in the first place, docks aren't necessary. All they do is encourage manufacturers to put mal-adjusted products out and leave it to the poor bloody customer to fix them. And they have the hide to charge you money for the tools. This is part of a nasty worldwide trend to outsource all costs of doing business onto customers. Consider your power or telephone company: they go to extreme lengths to put you off ringing them when something is wrong with the product they sold you, and when you do ring up, they are too greedy to pay a receptionist to answer the phone, they make you waste 15 minutes of your own time navigating menus because it saves them having to do the job you pay them for. With photographic gear, I'm perfectly happy paying a first-class manufacturer with excellent quality control to get it right the first time. This is particularly the case because I spend a lot of time in the deep outback where you are completely screwed if something isn't put together right.

FOR

But what if something does go wrong? What if it is something you could fix yourself with a $100 tool and a spare afternoon? Wouldn't you rather do that then mess about sending it off and hoping the post office doesn't lose it and waiting ages for it to come back? I would.

Secondly, while we have every right to expect Canon and Nikon to get it right every time (with their extensive in-house knowledge of their own products, their ability to modify Product A to be compatible with Product B if it seems necessary, and of course their premium pricing with (one assumes) extra ability to pay for comprehensive testing), it is another thing entirely to expect a third-party manufacturer to do all that and do it with three or four or five different mounts and systems, and do it without access to proprietary camera manufacturer knowledge. A company like Sigma not only has to design (say) a nice new 24-70 and fit it to all the Nikon systems, it has to do the same with Canon systems, and possibly one or two others as well, and cope with new camera bodies that haven't even been designed yet and won't take third-party lenses into consideration when they are. That's a big ask!

CONCLUSION

I am torn both ways. I think the for case and the against case are both strong. Either one taken in isolation is compelling - but taken together, they just leave me confused.

For me, there is no practical issue. All of the lenses I have owned are either Canon ones (which don't need a dock and work right straight out of the box) or Tokinas (which in theory might benefit from a dock given the arguments in the "for" case, but in practice - so far so good! - don't seem to). I admit that I do tend to shy away from Tamrons on QC grounds, and to a lesser extent Sigmas. My belief is that Tokina is a bit like Subaru - they don't make much (nothing remotely like the range of a Sigma or a Tamron) but what they do make is over-engineered to the point of being stodgy, and trustworthy on that account. I would happily consider a Sigma lens or even a Tamron ... but dock or no dock, I'd want to be buying it through the official Australian importer so as to have local service and warranty - at which point I'm paying the same price for the Sigma 24-70 that I could buy the Canon one for in Hong Kong, so I might as well just get the Canon.