I find all this fascinating.
In my very own experience I have actually run into all of the issues RH has mentioned.
The fact that his English is a little funny should not be misinterpreted as being hostile.
I still have 2 K100d bodies (one D and one D Super) and really, really, REALLY like them both a lot!
I grew up with K bayonet from when I was 15, and I am now 45!
BUT I HAD a K10d that failed catastrophically.
Disassembly showed me how poor the mechanical design of the antishake switch was. It broke off with a typical stress crack. It happened just sticking the cam into a soft camera bag, and the switch was designed and built without a proper mechanical position lock but was held in place by friction only - explaining the stress crack due to the very tight screw holding the pivot in place!
I know plastic, as I have worked many projects from fine model scale to automotive applications and plumbing over the years, and this was about as poor a design as I can imagine.
I also verified the injection molding problems Pentax had for a while on my own K10d, which started cracking around the base where the battery grip contacts the body. The K10d is now literally in the garbage!
I also had an istDL, which was nice, but awfully slow on the autofocus (the K100d runs circles around it and was a MAJOR upgrade, also in IQ).
I now have a K20d, and being probably the final production batch, it does not exhibit the banding issues that many users found on their K20d models and that I personally also had on my K10d that I ended up being thoroughly disgusted with. (the one that had bad plastic was the second K10d after a dead on arrival delivery where the metering exposed dark frames instead of proper images - another fault of the K10d I read about in other forums).
I am also getting used to a particular quirk of the K20d - severe underexposure that is quite obviously dependent on the color balance of the scene, as indoor shots (red shift in the light source!) are atrociously underexposed at about 1EV, but outdoor shots in bright light (i.e. blue shifted source) often benefit from underexposing by about 1/2 EV.
Proper exposure should be a no-brainer, as light meters have been around in one form or another for maybe 70 years or so, maybe even longer.
Those Hollywood cats somehow got all these film rolls exposed correctly, and Hollywood certainly never watsed money on bad camera men ruining literally miles of very expensive 35mm or even "cheap" 16mm film
Why they cannot get metering right.
Nikon is exemplary here!
Just to make another point, I am not bashing and singling out Pentax, as Canon is also bad with its metering!
The T1 and a few others I tried, like the 30d, XTi, and other "Rebel" bodies tend to over expose and really blow entire skies, not just highlights, but Canon is BIG and lives on strong consumer beliefs...
Plus I don't care for Canon glass, because the good stuff is way over priced, and the el-cheapos are lousy in across the frame sharpness and CAs.
Why Pentax still cannot get their metering right is beyond me, but blaming the photographer for underexposure as was done in a post above is NOT the solution.
The photographer should be able to read the meter and rely on it, instead of best guess compensating when the moment counts and cannot be repeated and then hoping for the best!
I am now keeping the K20d for slow deliberate work where I would want more resolution and still use the K100d and K100dS as my main bodies.
The only reason I am keeping the K20d, is because that was my last purchase as a final backup body to protect my investment in glass!
Talking glass - there is something funky about the chips in the Pentax lenses - the bodies tend to really underexpose with Pentax glass!
I use Tamron and Sigma (with which the K100 bodies expose properly!) and very rarely the Pentax glass, except the OLD Pentax F50 f/1.7, which exposes properly - but that is also not a "digital" lens, but an old full frame lens!
As far as I am concerned, the K100d and DS may be the ONLY really decent dSLRs that Pentax has made so far.
They expose properly (but ONLY in matrix mode), have great colors, and have as good a resolution and noise behavior as you can get from a 6MP model. My K100 bodies even beat the real life resolution of a few 10MP cams out there
Wanna see pics?
I do not claim to be a high grade art photographer, but I am happy with the shots I posted at
lapratho's Photo Galleries at pbase.com
Point being - I like my WORKING Pentax gear and would really like the brand to survive and thrive, and then get into something with a really snappy autofocus and even better low light performance than my K100d and K100dS.
BUT everything since has been a major disappointment - and RH has so far been 100% correct, whether you like it or not.
Oh - and the recently returned K2000 had a major autofocus issue. It tried to focus about 85 % of the way to the target, so had a major front focus error!
Back it went too!
So what is this about him getting booted here and his links getting deleted?
Let people look and read and make up their own mind - what are you afraid of?
Let the links stand!
Pentax needs to start paying attention to their quality control problems and make decent cameras that don't turn into boomerangs for Pentax!
I CERTAINLY do NOT want to lose my money on all those nice lenses now, should Pentax die! I want them to live and do well with good gear - just like RH!
later
Owen