Since I seem to have taken it upon myself to be the community jackass who tortures photo gear to find out what kind of abuse stuff can take, I have to say...
I'm beginning to think it's not possible to break a K-5.
Most recently, I was doing a video shoot this weekend, on a day that was far windier than I would like for a video shoot. But that's the day the project I was filming was happening. Like a smart kid, I left my camera unattended on a tripod, during a lull in the wind, not thinking that off course the wind was going to kick back up and blow over my setup. Which it did. Blew it right over, and rather forcefully. Tripod was at full height, so we're talking about a pretty legit impact. The camera landed on the left side, and snapped the mic plug right off, and left the male end still plugged into the input. There are pretty hefty scratches in the battery grip, camera body, and the hood of the lens, which was actually a Tamron 28-75/2.8. The mic input is definitely looser than it used to be, but it's still in place, still allows you to plug in and out a mic, and still transmits sound to the camera. Other than that and the scratches, it's totally fine. I used it all day yesterday for another all day video shoot, on another windier than I'd like day; but I paid closer attention to my tripods...
In other escapades, I spent a whole day shooting the dirt road/mountain bike section of an adventure race from the back of a truck, until my whole camera was brown with fine dust, and there wasn't a black spot left. Then spent the whole next day shooting in rain to clean things off. The day after that, we were shooting the kayak section of the race from the back of jet skis, and my friend Sam, who also uses a K-5 got dumped by his driver and swam with his K-5 and 18-55WR for about 10 second before he got back on the jet ski. Continued shooting for the rest of the day and the camera still works.
And there have been countless other small to medium sized bumps, drops, scraps, dunks and drips in the last 18 months since I got my first K-5. I've used my two as my sole workhorse cameras since then, and have put them not only through the tests of durability, but also the test of delivering, having shot over 50 editorial print pages with them, including 15
magazine covers, as well as a few commercial and editorial video projects; and boy do they deliver. Killer results in print and on screen.
Just thought that amongst all the internet nit-picking, pixel peeping and harsh criticisms we all love dish out on our cameras, I would share some stories from the field about how much these cameras kick ass. Be proud, Pentaxians. I've seen Canon 1D's crack their housing from 18 inch drops and Nikon D3's go dead after getting lightly splashed.
Cheers!
Ben
Last edited by FullertonImages; 03-07-2012 at 09:03 AM.