I hear you. Want my list? My first K-7 was and is a mostly reliable camera, but the front e-dial barely works now despite efforts to clean it with contact cleaner. It will get better for a while and then revert back to registering turns in the wrong direction. Bummer. The shutter button also has issues and barely registers half presses. Not entirely awful, but it keeps SR from engaging half the time. The sensor also has two pieces of dust lodged behind the filter stack somehow as well. Sometimes the shutter only opens halfway and the camera starts acting all weird. Turning it off and on a few times resets it. The camera has seen tons of use and a few drops, so I really can't complain too much. So then I buy a K-5 when the K-5 II was introduced. It was a fairly reliable camera at first. One day I dropped it off a tripod with my still broken 12-24. It bent the bayonet ring, which I swapped with my K-7. After that it seemed mostly reliable for about 6 months, though the mount was still not right which I didn't really know and just blamed my lenses for being bad. One day it started taking pictures that were half green like the sensor readout was failing. It was still under warranty so I sent it in and asked CRIS to check out the mount for me as I had doubts that it was in good shape. It came back with a new board and sensor, all fixed under warranty. They claim to have tested the mount, so I assumed they did and it was ok. Then one day in the cold the mirror starts flopping. This problem just grew worse over time and is triggered by temperatures under 60F. Stick it in the freezer and it will flop. Then the camera gets lost somehow, so I replace it with a K-5 IIs. The IIs has been rock solid though I have babied the hell out of it. I somehow get my K-5 back a month later and try a DA17-70 on it. Turns out it won't focus to infinity at all on the wide end. Its also extremely soft on the right side. So now I have a K-5 with a bad mirror flop issue and a bad mount. Probably not worth the cost to fix, but I'm going to send it back in anyways since it was a good backup at one time. Oh yeah, I bought another K-7 from a list member here and fell on it a month later. Broke the mount and my precious A35-105. I sort of fixed the screwholes in the mount and replaced it with a good ring, but for some reason it won't focus at all, so clearly the AF block or the mirror is out of whack. I need to test that out some more. The camera is pretty much minty asides from not focusing correctly. Bummer. Oh yeah. I bought two copies of the 16-45 (lost one somehow, long story) and both ended up just being horribly floppy and soft. The one copy was sort of good for a while, but then just got soft itself. Especially in portrait. So much so that I can't use the lens anymore. Sometimes I feel like I'm just throwing money away. I'm sure you get that feeling too.
On Wed, Aug 6, 2014 at 3:13 PM, Larry Colen <l...@red4est.com> wrote: > Sometimes I feel like the flower pot in Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy. > > My K-5 II, purchased about a year ago, is showing signs of a flakey power > board. Several times in the past week, I've been taking pictures and it > would just lock up and the only way to reset it would be to pull the > battery. > > My first K-5 started with intermittent problems, then finally died. I sent > it in to KRIS, and waited through the long delay while they repaired it, and > it died again a while later. I tried having it repaired down in San Diego > and it was converted to IR, but that repair did not last and they weren't > able to re-repair it. > > I do have a K-x for backup, but the shutter button on it is having issues, > and it would cost more to repair than it would to replace with a used one. > > My K100s, had the viewfinder delaminate or something. Both of my K-5s have > now had power board issues. My K-x is having issues with the shutter button. > My first K-20 was dropped so I can't blame all of it's troubles on > manufacturing, and at this point I don't remember if I had to send my > replacement K20 in. My AF-540 was an unmitigated piece of shit that I lost > count of the number of times I had to send it in for repairs. > > There are a lot of things that I love about my Pentax gear, but reliability > isn't one of them. It's almost like owning a FIAT with a viewfinder. > > -- > Larry Colen l...@red4est.com (postbox on min4est) > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > PDML@pdml.net > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and > follow the directions. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
