[clackers]

Nearly all manufacturers use sampling methods for Quality Control.

The original Canon 5D has mirror separation problems.

It goes on - the Nikon D600 had enough oil problems that they just made the 610 instead. The Nikon D750 has had three recalls for the same shutter issue, etc.

[Wheatfield]

No brand is perfect. Pentax is just less imperfect.

[Rondec]

When it comes to electronics, there will be some failures. The question is how is the service after the fact.

My experience when Pentax initially switched to Precision was poor -- I think Pentax just dumped a big backlog of broken gear on them to fix and hadn't given them the resources they needed to begin the repairs. More recently, the repairs have been done speedily and I have had nothing to complain about. Prices are reasonable on stuff taken care out of warranty and the warranty process has been easy to navigate.

I know that there are times when Precision has to send more unusual lenses off to Japan for service, but my sense is that that is more the exception than the rule. Certainly with the lenses I have sent to them for repairs, they have been fixed within a week to ten days and sent back in perfect order. The same with the couple of cameras.

The problem, I suppose, is that since I had a good experience I didn't post anything, while if my experience was negative I would start three threads to comment on Pentax's terrible service. Such is the magnification of the negative in the echo chamber we call the internet...

[ffking]

Just while we're there (or thereabouts) - does anybody have any experience ofthe new UK Service & Repairs Centre (John Pye Technical) ?

[thazooo]

The K-30 was released in May 2012; the K-50 was released thirteen months later in June 2013.

The problem takes at least two years - twenty-four months - to happen;

When the problem first developed, the official fix was to replace the aperture control with a new device of the same design, because it took time to diagnose this problem.

With that knowledge, what could they possibly have done differently, since the K-50 was released before very many, if any, K-30 had exhibited the problem???

Probably nothing, but Pentax could have stood Tall and offered a solution that didn't put the complete burden of repair on the consumer. This goes for both types of failures. Free parts and a negotiated Flat Rate Labor price from the repair center would have worked. Standing there and hiding behind 'OOOOPs it out of warranty' isn't the answer.

... attempt to absolve Ricoh from perpetual responsibility for owner disappointment ...

reductio ad absurdem? or simply mischaracterization of the majority of the complaints?

Yeah, okay.

I get that there's no company that's pure as driven snow, but Sony do seem historically to have been nastier than most.

true. I gave up on Sony over an issue with the original "Walkman".

...
If I get bad service or unsatisfying food at a restaurant I don’t stiff the waiter and I don’t slam the place on Yelp. I just don’t go back. I don’t buy certain brands of vehicle any more, or shop at certain stores but I don’t write Letters to the Editor about it. I just move on.
...

Makes perfect sense. In my own case, the $4000 defective lens issue, I reported the situation and ongoing status merely to inform. I don't need to exact vengeance online, I can waltz over to the General District Court, pay the clerk a small fee, and file a warrant in debt, bills of particulars, and subpoenas duces tecum and get a judgment against them and get paid. My purpose was simply to allow other folks to know better what they're dealing with. If I ever buy any Pentax equipment in the future, I'm simply going to make my purchasing decision on the assumption that the warranty is, as Col. Potter used to say, "horse-hockey".

...Fact: There is no economically-viable manufacturing or quality assurance process that guarantees every component and mechanism in every instance of every new product will make it out of the factory working, and keep on working until (or beyond) that product's expected service life. If such manufacturing and quality assurance processes were put in place, the cost of production would be so high that most folks wouldn't be able to afford the products, or - at the very least - wouldn't be prepared to pay so much for them.
...

I absolutely agree with this premise. The way modern hardware manufacturing works is by producing products within a range of "quality parameters". The result is a Gaussian ("normal") curve, where, by definition, about seventy per-cent of the products are within one standard deviation from the mean. We test for "quality" by noting deviations in terms of variance, and use hypothesis testing to determine whether, on the basis of a sample, an entire batch of product should be tossed or repaired. Got to keep that quality under control, after all, if the quality gets out of control, costs could go through the roof.

Where reality hits is when consumers buy the product. When I was working as a software developer for a major database software company, I learned their approach: if you can compile the code with an error code of 4 or less, that's "unit testing"; if you can run it through the linkage-editor with an error code of 8 or less and produce a runnable object-module, that's "system integration testing". When you sell it to the customer (at a quarter-million dollars per copy in early-'80's dollars), that's "beta testing". Then you see how the customers bitch and moan about it, and fix the things that are really "shouldn't happen situations".

There are two developments that haven't really been accounted for. These are the incredibly rapid rate of hardware development necessitating compressed product engineering cycles, and the fact that increasing numbers of ordinary humans armed with degrees in "computer science" are doing software engineering. The result is that almost every manufactured product today is created and sold as a disposable commodity. And having just-plain-folks developing software, by my lights, is like trying to get a bunch of art-school graduates to mass-produce masterpiece paintings, and that without enough time to figure out what it is they're really doing. ( Recent airplane disasters show the dangers of the effects of embedded software systems.)

I have a fairly recent Samsung TV. Microprocessor controlled, but the software's pretty buggy. I can put up with that from a TV, but it kind of makes you wonder about things like "self-driving vehicles", don't it?

Thing is, the camera isn't really just a camera. It's a micro-network of embedded computer systems, driven by software. As has been pointed out, it's an extremely complex system involving all sorts of engineering, and I think Pentax does a really great job of all that. They have great lenses, and excellent engineering. But as I've said elsewhere, I probably won't buy anything from them again, precisely because they don't seem to be able or willing to handle the "beta-testing". Maybe they should raise their prices so they can afford to support the product, or perhaps Ricoh should invest more in that part of the company so it would become so competitive that they wouldn't have to worry about the loss of what little market share they've got.

I genuinely wish Ricoh/Pentax well. I love their products (the ones that work, that is). I hope they'll do better. But I don't buy products on the basis of sentimentality. Effectiveness is all that matters.

[tvdtvdtvd]

I should have been more specific. Sony Corporation, not just cameras, I abhor. Going back to Trinitrons, computers, DRM, rootkits, etc. as well as compromised RAW files and the like.

Hear!Hear!

I too gave up on Sony products a long time ago on account of poor product support*. I cringe a little whenever I see someone
trumpeting Sony as the latest and greatest version of bread; I know the allure. Sony >do< make enticing products. Sony are
very good at bringing advanced tech to the masses. But they are so focused on bringing that next great invention to market
they simply can't be bothered to support what they already sold and will drop old tech faster than anyone else. As Sony pushes
further into the camera market I'm sure many, many others will learn this lesson too.

(*) - Those DRM/rootkit shenanigans never affected me directly but I did take notice and added them to the list of reasons
for my 'never Sony' policy.

[reh321]

Nearly all manufacturers use sampling methods for Quality Control.

The part that goes bad in K-30/50 was used by Pentax for many years - in fact, it was used in the Super Program I purchased in 1983 ..... that camera still works correctly! However, the supplier changed the materials used; as far as I know, no one here knows whether the supplier notified Pentax - if they did notify Pentax, there is no indication either company expected the substitution to change performance, as demonstrated by the fact that neither company used a new part number to denote the revised part. The new part apparently passed all acceptance testing, the testing of received parts which is the linchpin part of Quality Control, and the newly assembled cameras operated correctly, so they would pass final testing. Only after a couple years of use, especially with periods of non-use, would problems occur; expecting testing of that nature for a consumer camera is just asking for too much.

[normhead]

The part that goes bad in K-30/50 was used by Pentax for many years - in fact, it was used in the Super Program I purchased in 1983 ..... that camera still works correctly! However, the supplier changed the materials used; as far as I know, no one here knows whether the supplier notified Pentax - if they did notify Pentax, there is no indication either company expected the substitution to change performance, as demonstrated by the fact that neither company used a new part number to denote the revised part. The new part apparently passed all acceptance testing, the testing of received parts which is the linchpin part of Quality Control, and the newly assembled cameras operated correctly, so they would pass final testing. Only after a couple years of use, especially with periods of non-use, would problems occur; expecting testing of that nature for a consumer camera is just asking for too much.

Which brings up another strategy.... buy your camera at close outs, when the price is lower, and any problems with the camera are likely to be known. If there is one lesson here it should be pre-ordering and being an early adopter has its risks.

[reh321]

Probably nothing, but Pentax could have stood Tall and offered a solution that didn't put the complete burden of repair on the consumer. This goes for both types of failures. Free parts and a negotiated Flat Rate Labor price from the repair center would have worked. Standing there and hiding behind 'OOOOPs it out of warranty' isn't the answer.

But the only parts available today are the part known to fail - the "good" part is no longer available from the part supplier - so someone would be doing the same task every few years.

I believe the best we could have hoped for from Ricoh was a discount on a future camera - but that is pushing things.

[reh321]

There are two developments that haven't really been accounted for. These are the incredibly rapid rate of hardware development necessitating compressed product engineering cycles, and the fact that increasing numbers of ordinary humans armed with degrees in "computer science" are doing software engineering. The result is that almost every manufactured product today is created and sold as a disposable commodity. And having just-plain-folks developing software, by my lights, is like trying to get a bunch of art-school graduates to mass-produce masterpiece paintings, and that without enough time to figure out what it is they're really doing.

That is where the various software standards come into play. When I worked for a defense contractor, we worked under the discipline of several standards such as "ISO 2000". These standards specify procedures to be followed at every stage of development, moving much of the responsibility for quality to how you design, how you develop, and how you test. I spent two years on Air Traffic Control, most of it on testing the new system

( Recent airplane disasters show the dangers of the effects of embedded software systems.)

Problem with the new Boeing "max" airplanes seems to have been a failure at the System Engineering stage - a single point of failure could bring down the craft. The new version duplicates the critical part, and notifies the crew if sensors differ, so they can turn off the automatic system and return to the airport on manual.

[normhead]

But the only parts available today are the part known to fail - the "good" part is no longer available from the part supplier - so someone would be doing the same task every few years.

I believe the best we could have hoped for from Ricoh was a discount on a future camera - but that is pushing things.

Unless we were there in the room, we likely will never know what options were considered, and what they could have done. If Pentax R&D had been put off while the issue was adequately addressed to keep forum members happy, would that have been OK? Or if the cost of the imagined "perfect " repair was paid for in part by other systems putting prices up, would that have been OK?

I personally expect heavy users should buy more expensive systems. Systems like the K-30 and K-50 I would suggest are for lighter users. It's sad the cameras failed, but there's a bigger picture here. More durable options were available and the projected shutter counts were known. ( the published shutter count was less than expected, but still, there were more durable options available for those concerned about durability.) Did people really expect K-5 or K-3 durability for K-30, K-50 prices? For a lot of folks 5000 shutter actuations a year is a lot of actuations, and the cameras should last 10 years at that rate. We aren't talking about a flagship models here.

I'm reading all these complaints, and what I end up thinking is "I don't know enough." And a suspicion that Pentax knows more than anyone here about what was possible and what wasn't. And the K-P average selling price is over $1000 as opposed to $620 for a K-30. I assume that means they've added value to make sure a K-30 type situation doesn't happen again, but now a lot of those K-30 customers will find the camera too expensive.

In any case, i suspect after the K-xx series seems to have ended with the K-70, my suspicion is that Pentax will never agin try to put their best image producing tech into lower priced bodies. They may abandon lower priced bodies all together, and if they don't, they'll go the route everyone else does. Inferior sensor and inferior imaging tech, a whole cheaply designed system with durable 2 or 3 fps shutter. Not the best tech they have in a cheaper package for low volume users.

So I suspect the aperture block failure did change Pentax, just not in the way everyone thinks. Clearly, if you take a good solid system and then try and cheap it down for the masses, there are a lot of things that could go wrong. That strategy failed, brought them a lot of bad press, and the K-P costs almost as much as my K-3 did. Hopefully it's been a learning experience for everyone.

You look at the K-70 and Pentax tried to bring their most current tech including custom chips (the accelerator chip, the same one used on the K-1ii) in an $800 body. I doubt any camera company will ever try that again. And while from a PR standpoint, that may have been failure, and for a lot of users who should have gone flagship and didn't it was a bummer, it's the low volume 2,000 shot a year guys who will miss out. Snatch up those K-70s while you can dudes. You've got a K-1 quality camera at a K-30 type price, if you're a low shutter actuation shooter. Looking at the numbers, If my wife had bought a K-30 instead of her K-5 she'd certainly have been on her second camera, and buying the cheaper camera wouldn't have saved her a cent, and probably would have cost her money. But those K-xx series camera are still great image quality at an affordable price, even if they won't give you as many shutter actuations as a flagship model. Those opportunities will be thing of the past.

There's always a lot of ways to look at a given situation.

Maybe Pentax should have done this that or the other, or maybe what they did was the right thing for the long haul. No more K-xx series cameras, or design philosophy. It clearly wasn't worth it. If that isn't what you wanted, your complaints were counterproductive.