Just finished our ISO 9000 & AS 9003 audits/certification, and we passed! Honestly, didn’t change our processes at all - just lots of extra documentation, but it prevents filling out quality surveys and hosting constant on-site inspections. It did cause us to change from MIL STD 105E sampling to the newer ANSI standard, and now if a part fails any spec (we use automated optical scanning), we now reinspect the entire batch for that dimension. The Keyence inspection machines cost as much as the Robotic CNC mills that made the part.

MAYBE the enterprise drives, but not the consumer class $50-$100 drives. I’ve been to too many production lines in my career and have been the QA manager for an aerospace company for the last few years to believe that. We build ISO 9000/AS9003 flight qualified components and our QA is on-site audited regularly by companies such as Lockheed Martin. We sample our production per Mil STD and ANSI specs and we only test 1-3 out of a hundred products off the assembly line. There’s no way you can afford to do 100% QA and burn in on a $100 part.

I agree for the most part (although I believe there was a certain "romance" in doing darkroom work. I always embraced the chemical smells and the magic of seeing images emerge from blank pages), but now we are talking photography. My view of the downside is when photography is used as an element of something that is much more. To some, it is just a kind of brush or a tube of magenta oil, not an end in itself. So much of what I see represented as photography is far removed from actual photography and much more in the realm of graphic arts. There is plenty of room for both but I hate to see pure photography diminished in galleries and exhibits in favor of something that was more created in a computer program than through a camera lens.