Originally posted by stevebrot Would you care to enumerate?
Originally posted by Racer X 69 There seems to be no shortage of threads and posts here regarding the problems with the K3. Every time I visit this forum they are not hard to miss.
If you say so...The reason I ask is that I actively monitor and respond to troubleshooting requests for models that I have owned or have significant hands-on experience with. At present that includes the K10D, K-30/K-50, and K-3. Aside from the runaway mirror issue (not present as a general problem for about a year at this point) and the periodic freeze-up (also only rarely reported at present, though never formally acknowledged by Ricoh/Pentax) the K-3 has not been particularly trouble prone. The pattern I have seen overall is the usual mix of user error, inexperience/unreasonable expectation, camera abuse, and the odd lemon body.*
Sadly the industry standard for defects is alarmingly high. At present Consumer Reports data for repairs and serious problems with interchangeable lens cameras is as follows:
- Panasonic: 4%
- Canon: 5%
- Sony: 7%
- Pentax/Ricoh: 7%
- Nikon: 8%
- Olympus: 8%
These numbers represent a significant spike since six months ago.** At that time Pentax was not on the list, but (IIRC) Sony and Canon were at 4% with Nikon at 6%. Undoubtedly, the general recall of Pentax K-3II and ongoing K-50 problems are at least partially responsible for the brand's poor showing there. I find it shocking that greater than 1 in every 14 Sony, Pentax, Nikon, or Olympus ILC that goes out the door of B&H is going to go back for replacement or warranty repair. A year or so ago the average was less than 1 in 20.***
Steve
* The thing that makes tabulating issues hard is that some users with problems tend to spam the forums for every little thing. In general, one can discount reports of "AF sucks", "video sucks", "cannot get good photos", pre/post purchase paranoia, or resurrection of ancient threads asking if "x" is still a problem.
** Consumer Reports updates their quality and reliability reports annually in the Fall based on surveys sent out in the early summer.
*** To provide a bit of perspective, the defect rate for laptop computers ranges from 10% (Apple) to 19% (HP, Toshiba, Dell, and Asus).