I chatted with Pentax Live Support and had the following conversation:
Please wait while we find an agent to assist you... You have been connected to Randall S. Randall S: Thank you for contacting Pentax chat support mspoon, how may I help you? mspoon: Hi! I purchased a K30 last week and I'm experiencing what may be a bug in the camera. When taking videos, the shutter seems to fire most, but not all of the time. If I'm at aperture f/4.0, it hardly ever fires, but at other apertures, almost always. Doing odd things like cycling the menu or zooming in/out slightly can change whether the shutter fires. Is this a known bug? mspoon: There are more details in a forum, if you'd like concrete steps to reproduce what I and some others are seeing: https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/pentax-k-30/193296-shutter-fires-video-mode.html Randall S: this is not a known issue in the camera. Is the video you're getting displaying evidence of shutter misfiring? ie: is the video jerky? mspoon: No, I haven't noticed either of those. There's a bit of a rolling shutter effect, especially if SR is turned on, but that's probably unrelated. The main thing is that the shutter doesn't seem to need to fire b/c sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't, hence making it kind of annoying. Randall S: in video recording mode the camera is not actually using a mechanical shutter mechanism to acquire 30fps. The images are being sampled at the sensor while the mirror mechanism is being held up. All I can advise you is to send in your camera for examination if you think it is malfunctioning. mspoon: And the mirror is supposed to go up right when you enter video mode, and stay up the entire time, right? Randall S: also, you should be using at least a Class 6 memory card for adequate write speed. Randall S: yes, the mirror has to be up for the sensor to record any image. mspoon: Yes, I'm using a Class 10 card, so that shouldn't be an issue. Okay, what you're saying matches what I expect -- I shouldn't get any shutter movement at all in video mode. But I and several others in the forum are. Thanks for confirming that. Randall S: Thank you for contacting Pentax chat support mspoon, have a great day! Thank you for using InstantService. You may now close this window. Your session has ended. You may now close this window.
So his advice was to send the camera in if I thought it was malfunctioning. Based on the fact that, so far, only me, dwsiii and Finger (but for the K-x) have reported seeing it, it would seem most others don't have this problem. Unless people are not seeing this thread and/or thinking it's normal behavior, like I did before dwsiii brought it up.
So can I kindly ask once more for what dwsiii asked for before: can any K-30 owners out there definitely say that they are NOT experiencing this problem? I just want to know that good units really are out there before I send mine in because, with my luck, I'll get the same thing back with no fix. :-(