Originally posted by onebeachbumm
After spending 2 days trying to understand half written instructions and eventually gathering all the facts except how to get in DeBug mode so that I could disable the SDM I called Ricoh for the answer and they could not/would not provide it.
You can complain about
- SDM reliability not being up to scratch, and
- Pentax refusing to give users an official option to switch from SDM to screw-drive AF, if a lens offers both options.
What you cannot complain about is Ricoh not helping you with hacking your lens.
Do you expect Microsoft to help you hack their software so that it better suits your needs?
Once you are outside what a company officially supports, you are on your own. If you are unhappy about that w.r.t. to Ricoh, you'd have to be unhappy about that with every company.
The official way to get your issue resolved would have been to have the SDM lens repaired.
Once you choose an unofficial path, you cannot complain about lack of support. The debug menu is not meant to be used by non-technicians and as you can tell by
wibbly's story there are good reasons for it. If you had screwed up your lens data, even a Ricoh service centre would not have been able to repair your lens without fully profiling it again. That exercise would have probably cost more than you would have been prepared to spend, if anyone outside Japan can do it at all.