[Ontarian50]

If that camera was on my repair bench, the first thing I'd do is take the back off and check and clean the connections between the back cover and the board.

Sitting idle for some time might have inspired a bit of corrosion and poor internal connection.

In other words, might be the buttons aren't working because the buttons aren't working

[photogem]

Huh? The current Seiko January 2020 catalog lists MS421R, MS621R, MS621FE, MS621T, and TS621E.

Most can be found in stock at Mouser or Digikey in the US. You can even find some of them on Amazon. Mouser shows a 7-11 week factory lead time which indicates they are still in production.

https://www3.sii.co.jp/en/me/files/2020/02/MicroBatteryCatalogue_E_2020_forWeb.pdf

Difference between numbers on paper and reality!
Did you ever try to order them?

I did, am a regular customer of Digikey

[lastmotion]

I found the following description on the DPREVIEW forum.
My ist*D also stopped at the date setting screen after turning on the power,
but if I turned on the power while holding down the shutter button, it started up without any problems.

----- Quote -----

I fixed it and posting the instructions in case someone will find them useful.

It appears that settings memory in my camera was corrupted and slight variation in camera battery type was causing it to lockup. There is no "official" procedure to reset the settings but I found that turning the camera on while holding shutter button pressed does the trick.

I did that with no batteries which seems to drain the power out of internal circuits. Then I did that with the set of batteries with which camera appears to work the most reliably. After this until I change the batteries camera would power up OK. After making sure camera powers up reliably, I upgraded firmware to 2.0. This seems to completely reset all the settings in the camera. I had to reset all of the menus and the date.

Now camera works fine with any batteries even with the ones it did not work before. I am not sure it is completely fixed but so far it appears to be.

I would guess that if you have 2.0 fw in the camera downgrading to 1.2 or 1.1 and upgrading back to 2.0 will do the same.

I got reply from pentax (within 24 hours) which told me to send camera in for service. I hope that I would not need to do this now.

I have a 30 minites charger and 8 hours charger. If batteries charged in 30 minutes charger they seemed to cause camera to lockup. I for the live of me can't figure out how this could happen. I measured output of batteries after ether charger and it is roughly the same.

Any way I am happy it works and will post here any updates.

[lastmotion]

Power on with pressing the shutter button.