[gosman]

On two photo shoots, I have had a K-3 lockup. I get a display showing even when I turn the camera to the off position. I have to remove the battery grip and take out the battery in the camera. Replacing the battery resets the camera and starts it up again. It always occurs when I'm in a tight situation with a lot of shooting. Embarrassing when you have talent waiting for you to fix your camera! I have upgraded to 1.02. Will do the 1.03 today sometime. Anyone else having this problem?

[Rite]

We may be in for a long ride on the battery grip/mirror panic issues ..

K3 Firmware 1.03 and mirror flap

Rite ..

[AquaDome]

I had it with version 1.0 after lots of long exposures on a low battery and focusing with live-view. Stock battery. I don't have a battery grip.
Power-hungry cameras with tiny batteries is not an engineering challenge I would undertake, so kudos to the engineers at Pentax. Oh, I mean Ricoh.

[distudio]

On two photo shoots, I have had a K-3 lockup. I get a display showing even when I turn the camera to the off position. I have to remove the battery grip and take out the battery in the camera. Replacing the battery resets the camera and starts it up again. It always occurs when I'm in a tight situation with a lot of shooting. Embarrassing when you have talent waiting for you to fix your camera! I have upgraded to 1.02. Will do the 1.03 today sometime. Anyone else having this problem?

I had a lock-up as you describe when using a battery in the camera and grip under v 1.02, like you it was a tight/fast shooting situation and was very embarrassing. I simply didn't have time to remove the grip and camera battery so I just threw the lens on my trusty K5 (which I shoot along side the K3) and kept shooting. I've since refrained from putting a battery in the body (which negates one of the reasons that I bought the grip) but it has not locked up 8000 images later, I have since however experienced corruption of two SD cards which cost me hours of file recovery time.

[gosman]

On the SD card corruption issue: My teacher told me yesterday to always reformat the SD card after every shoot instead of deleting. I have been just deleting and no problem so far. Any truth in this reformatting every time suggestion? She said it can lead to corruption if you just delete each time!

[AquaDome]

Format the SD card in the camera. I do it every time on all of my cameras and I never have any card problems. You want to be just like me, don't you? BTW, I also "eject" the SD card before removing it from the computer.

[distudio]

On the SD card corruption issue: My teacher told me yesterday to always reformat the SD card after every shoot instead of deleting. I have been just deleting and no problem so far. Any truth in this reformatting every time suggestion? She said it can lead to corruption if you just delete each time!

Good advice and precisely what I did before the problem occurred. I have my cards configured to cascade and the first card was never written to as the file system had been made invalid in camera and the second card had corruption of the Pentax folder. Only the first card was replaced when the camera indicated that both cards were full. So it was entirely a function of the camera system, not me potentially damaging the cards through bad practices. These cards have both worked flawlessly in K5 bodies, one of them for a couple of years without any corruption issues, the other is relatively new, both are original Sandisk Ultras.

[DSims]

On the SD card corruption issue: My teacher told me yesterday to always reformat the SD card after every shoot instead of deleting. I have been just deleting and no problem so far. Any truth in this reformatting every time suggestion? She said it can lead to corruption if you just delete each time!

Or you can just never format the card and leave the factory format. Because you'll probably be reading it on both the camera and computer, and sometimes even writing on both (instead of just the camera).


If you format on the camera each time, then you should be OK on that camera. If you switch it to another camera, or want/need to write something to it from the computer, I'd rather just have the factory format. But use quality cards like SanDisk.


If you've never formatted the card, I'd leave it alone. I say this based on a little bit of IT experience. For example, can you tell me the good (although somewhat risky) reason people used to cut a second notch on their floppy disks?

If it ain't broke ... and it don't even act like it's broke - don't format it!

[AquaDome]

For example, can you tell me the good (although somewhat risky) reason people used to cut a second notch on their floppy disks?

The hole-puncher double-sider turns a 180k floppy into a 360k floppy.

[DSims]

The hole-puncher double-sider turns a 180k floppy into a 360k floppy.

Very good (although I was kinda wondering if the op knew) - we have a winner! It let's you flip it over and use the second side, which has maybe a 70-80% chance of being as reliable as the first side (since the second side was presumably never tested for QC).


But let's face it, I'm right and you're wrong on the SD card issue!


In any case, neither have I had a problem while using the factory format on my (mostly SanDisk) cards. I'm more comfortable with it, because sometimes I'll do crazy things like only deleting some of my photos, or deleting some from the camera and others from the computer. If it matters which device you format the card on (and it appears to), then by formatting on a certain device you've just made the card more compatible (or reliable) on that device. A factory format on a good card seems to work well on almost all devices out of the box (and any devices it didn't work well on would be suspect).

[ENicolas]

Used my new BG-5 for the first time today and my K-3 locked-up twice. Firmware 1.03.

I had an old Takumar K-mount 135mm f/2.5 on at the time.

It was aggravating to say the least as I was in the middle of shooting a massive HDR panorama.So I was in remote bracketing mode at the time and had to switch off/on and reset everything.

By comparison my $50 aftermarket BG-4 clone from China that I use on my K-5 has never given me any trouble.

[DRabbit]

Had lockups occur quite a bit with both K3s I had... with and without crazy mirror flapping. Might be embarrassing, but more importantly, it causes you to lose shots, and I'm sometimes shooting in situations where the shot cannot be recreated... if it's lost, it's lost for good.

Video of my lockup here. Beginning of video shows silent lockup without mirror-flapping.
https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/172-pentax-k-3/254464-k3-crazy-mirror-sic...ours-here.html

I also had an SD corruption issue at the end of a shooting day when I was shooting time-lapse. I had to recover over 5000 shots. Talk about lots of hours of frustration.

I never use the battery grip. All lockups occurred while just using genuine Pentax batteries.

I may sound like a broken record at this point to some people, but after going through two K3 bodies, I finally just got two K5-IIs bodies instead. The K3 just had too many reliability issues for use in the professional arena. It's really disappointing because the K3 is otherwise capable of amazing images.

[amoringello]

FYI, formats are a standard. You can format in-camera or on computer and it won't matter.
If it did matter you'd have a whole lot of problems real quick, like when you open the package and insert the card for the first time.
Either it works or it don't. No in between. Its another myth propagated by some high profile "professionals" that really should know better.


BUT... where some cameras fail is when they decide they need some sort of photo or settings database, and that information can only be written during camera format. Some newer cameras like the Sony will write that to the card if it isn't there when a new card is inserted.
Some other brands or older models don't know any better and simply decide that they won't work without formatting.
Older cameras can also fail if the card contains non-image files.... time to get out of the 1990s. :-)

In reality, it is not the card format itself that is bad, it is the camera's OS.

Happily, Pentax cameras won't care if you format your card in camera, on the computer or in another camera. They don't care if you have other files on the card. Pentax is smart enough to not care about things it doesn't understand.


One of the best things you can do is run f3write/f3read on any new card. Or periodically on older cards.
It will fill every byte on the card. It is designed to tell if your SD card id counterfeit and not actually capable of holding the reported number of MBs... but as a side effect it can help force any bad bits to be marked as unusable. I've had a couple of new cards with bad spots work fine now for years. (with periodically testing and no more errors)

Normal use and formatting cannot touch every byte on an SD device.
Its just a matter of bad luck when one day when the OS usage-balances things such that you hit the bad spot and you lose your files.