Originally posted by stevebrot I have had no issues with my two purchases (K10D and K-3), though I do have a friend that had the aperture/mirror controller issue on her K-50.
WIW, Consumer Reports keeps a running account of failure or serious repair for interchangeable lens cameras based on member polls. The published numbers are:
- Estimated failure rates for three-year old cameras
- Based on member responses for cameras purchased between 2011 and 2016
- Expressed as percent likelihood
The most recent tally goes like this:
- Fuji: 3%
- Canon: 3%
- Nikon: 4%
- Sony: 4%
- Panasonic: 5%
- Pentax: 6%
- Olympus: 8%
Differences of less than 4 points are deemed insignificant. Both Nikon and Sony are doing better than the last report where IIRC,
Sony was at 7% and Nikon at 6%. Pentax was at 5% and has been as low as 3%.
Edit: Boy was I off! I found a copy of the Fall 2015 reliability report and those numbers sorted out as follows:
Fall 2015 Report for period 2010-2015 (not current survey) - Panasonic: 4%
- Canon: 5%
- Sony: 7%
- Pentax: 7%
- Nikon: 8%
- Olympus: 8%
There were no results for Fuji.
End edit
Steve
If I am interpreting the Consumer Report data correctly, it says "no matter which brand you buy, about 1 out of every 20 cameras will fail within the first 3 years"?!?
If true, I don't like those odds. And the dozens of posts to this thread report dozens of Pentax cameras purchased over many years with few failures, which seems to contradict the CR rates.
Two concerns about the CR data. First it's self reported data which may not represent the whole data, and second, we don't know how many data points are represented by the percentages. Statistics are useless if from a small number of values which are not a representative sample.
The same concerns apply to the comments in this thread, so sadly, an accurate answer to the OP's question will probably need to be found somewhere else.
Even a camera shop or repair center which works on a large volume of all brands would not know the answer. To say "We see many Nikons with problems but few Pentaxes" ignores the total number of each brand which are in use, and also, it may be that Nikon and Pentax owners may use their cameras in different ways.