Hi Ralph,
On Mon, 20 Oct 2014 14:28:39 +0200 Ralf R Radermacher wrote:
I'm thinking about buying a K-3 with the 18 - 135 mm lens and must
admit I haven't paid much attention to all the K-3 discussions. But I
think I remember threads about various probs like the famous mirror
flapping bug.
A very late reply, but I have been on a 3 week roadtrip covering part
of route-66 and the Natchez-trace.
I know you already got yourself a K3 by now, but I do want to share
my experiences from this roadtrip, where I took well over 3300 images.
This K3 is almost a year old, and has about 8000 exposures sofar.
It has firmware rev 1.11, is being used with the GPS unit attached,
using fast 32Gb and
a somewhat slower 64Gb Sandisk memory card.
It was used in P mode mostly, and sometimes TaV.
Lens used was the DA 18-135 for 95%, and the SIGMA 50-500 OS for the
rest.
Has all this been dealt with, in the meantime, or are there any
potential probs one should be aware of?
First off, I made some really good images during the trip, in general
the K3 did not dissapoint,
there have been several low-light ones to, with ISO turned up to 6400
or so.
Does the K-3 suffer from the usual Pentax probs like sticking trigger
button, erratic rear thumbwheel etc. that I've had on practically all
of my Pentax DSLRs over the years?
I experienced three different kind of problems during the trip, two of
them
really annoying due to the frequency of them occuring:
1:
Quite often, I found one of the settings that can be changed directly
with the four-way
controller to be 'off by one' after putting the camera away for a
while (front seat :)
and retrieving it. This would be White-balance, drive-mode changes
mostly,
and also the mode of displaying INFO at the rear screen.
This happened at least once a dat (every few hundred exposures) and I
assume it may
be caused by unintended activation of the four-way controller.
2:
On one ocassion, when shooting with the Sigma 50-500 in Continuous Mode,
I experienced the 'Mirror flapping' after a burst of perhaps 25 shots.
Switching off, and removing the battery briefly, made the camera
responsive again.
But it would NOT take anymore pictures at that point, which turned out
to be caused
by the memory card being full. (not sure if that caused the mirror
flapping too).
3: (the most annoying)
After NOT using the camera for a while, probably letting go into
power-save mode,
if quite often happened that the exposure values (in P mode) were
completely off:
- aperture completely closed (values f/22 to f/40, depending on focal
length set)
- exposure times WAY to long (at least 5 stops over) like half a second
This results in way overexposed images with lots of motion blurr.
This condition does NOT reset itself, I had to use either the green
button to fix it,
or turn the camera off/on to reset it.
Of the 3300 images, this has const me at least 30 shots, some of them
not repeatable, so really lost opportunities.
So, while I am quite happy with the quallity of many of the images I got,
I also was frustrated quite a few times by the K3 ...
Regards, JvW
------------------------------------------------------------------
Jan van Wijk; http://www.dfsee.com
Flickr : jvw_pentax
