Originally posted by BillO For those of you that don't know, what used to be Pentax Canada has now broken camp and pulled up stakes. The camera division no longer has a service facility or an office location in Canada. All service will now go through Sun Camera in Vaughn. Stephen Ho, who used to be their service director has now transferred over to the medical optics division. The remaining people in the camera division all work from home.
Folks I've spoken to lately are:
Dan Savoie - marketing/sales (705) 598-2056, he works from home out of Sudbury, ON.
Dan told me today that Ricoh Japan has identified the problem and has a base firmware up-grade to fix this. Apparently this cannot be user installed and has to be done at a service facility. He told me to arrange to send it / bring it in to Sun Camera and gave me their phone number.
Sun Camera - new Ricoh service (905) 669-6409. 2150 Steels Av. W., Unit 5, Vaughn, ON L4K 2Y7
Sun camera are not yet set-up to do anything with Ricoh or Pentax cameras. According to them "A bunch of stuff has started arriving this week", but they will not be set up to do any service for another 3 weeks or more. The person that I spoke to knew nothing about the base level firmware update. He suggested I contact them again in 3 weeks to see how far along they were. He seemed indifferent at best.
I have lost all confidence in Ricoh/Penatx over this. I feel that have abandoned the Canadian market and have left us with a huge hole in being able to get any service at all. They obviously don't give a tinker's damn. This K3 is my last Pentax/Ricoh. Time to bite the bullet and begin the change to a going concern.
UPDATE
First, BillO, thanks for the info. I'm going to contact the people I've talked to at Pentax and see if they confirm what you've said. Will be interesting to see what Pentax/Ricoh USA has to say.
I've updated the first post with latest numbers of reports from people. Thanks to those of you who have added your reports. Sorry you've had the problem!
Serial Numbers: It didn't dawn on me prior, but the fact they start with a 4 or a 2 seems to indicate body color, not country. I've corrected the first post on this point.
Unfortunately, I've been in and out of the hospital since Memorial Day weekend and am still trying to recover from surgery and some complications. Hopefully it'll be a smoother road from here on out.