Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1997/06/09

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Subject: R8 VS RTS III Reliability
From: Chan Eng Suan <engsuan@tp.ac.sg>
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 1997 14:58:39 +0800

Otto wrote:

>>I did call the figure "MRBF, average" and I hope it passes critical eyes. 
The 4 bodies were turned around in use, trying to accomplish an even 
load. However no exact figures on how many rolls which body actually did
were recorded. Nor did I record any max or min rolls before a failure 
occurred.<<

You are correct to quote the MRBF of 322.6 rolls for your 4 bodies. What
I meant was if you take ANY RTS III randomly and use it *under the same
coditions* as you used for your 4 bodies, then the MRBF will be some
what more conservative. My calculation suggests it is at least 222
rolls. ( based on one-sided Chi-square distribution at 95% confidence
level.)

If I have the data for R8 I could use what the reliability engineer
called time-truncated (without failure) to estimate the MRBF. But for
the two sets of data to have any meaningful comparison, the cameras must
worked under the same condition (the way you handled them and  the
environment they were subjected to.) 

And so far we are assuming the failure rates of the cameras are
constant, that is to say the MRBF of first 2 years is the same as that
of the subsequent 2 years. It is theoretically acceptable to consider
electronic circuits and equipment to have constant failure rate, but
rarely so for mechanical parts. You have been using RTS III for 3.25
years but the R8's are less that a year in the market....the
discrepancies are there.


Cheers,

Eng-Suan
engsuan@tp.ac.sg
(65)780-5532