Originally posted by pentup This has been a helpful thread for me, because I was planning to get either a DA70 Ltd to use on my K-7, or a K-5 some time very soon. Now I'm leaning toward applying the money to a D7000 instead. Pentax will still be aound if I decide to come back to the fold in the future. Maybe the successor to the K-r will be appealing, or maybe the K-5's prices will come down enough for me to feel comfortable getting one, but for now the litany of quality issues is just too long for me to ignore and gamble on being one of those lucky "thousands."
It sounds like we are in pretty much the same situation. I fully understand the effect that forums have on exaggerating the defects that even a small number of products might have. But some of these problems are very serious and indicate that at least in some cameras the QC is very deficient. What percentage of the K-5's are perfect and what percentage have issues and how many will eventually have problems when they get more shutter cycles on them? I doubt that there is any way to really know.
I would feel better about taking a chance on getting an issue free K-5 if the repair cycles were not so long - I have read numerous posts where people have gone without their camera for months, and sometimes on more than one occasion. That is the part that I can not get around, the fact that I might be knowingly buying a camera with potential issues - for some serious money - and then perhaps spend significant time without it. I know that other camera brands also have issues, but these extremely long repair waits are not typical from my experience. In most cases high end electronics products with significant defects are replaced by the manufacturer, but Pentax seems to think that we will be satisfied to just wait until they can get around to fixing their cameras.
I'm still on the fence on this one. I love the design and I would really like to own a K-5, but it appears to me at the very least to be a bit of a gamble at this point. Reading other threads makes it seem that any K-5 made after 5/2011 should be past the stains and mirror overrun problems. If my dealer gets a body built after that I might go ahead. Sorry to be trolling on these problem threads, but I really don't want to spend a lot on a camera that I love when it works, but which does not work consistently.