Hi!
After a long leave from serious photography, better described as "from 13x18 (cm.!) to digital compact" and with "from great travels to no travels at all", i decided to finally stop waiting for a Pentax full frame camera and buy two Pentax digital SRL bodies to use all the great Pentax lenses i still own.
So i got a K10D and a K200D from fleabay, one for me and one for my wife.
My K10D works well, or maybe i should say that i "think" is working well, because i haven't tried the vast majority of its option.
But the K200D is hsowing a werid behaviour:
when i wanted to test the camera before giving a positive feedback, i found myself short of good alkaline batteries, and as i could not go out cause of very long snowstorm (1mt. of snow in front of my door!), i tried with all the options i had at home:
with rechargeable Ni-Mh AA's, all the batteries i tried gave me was a flashing battery icon, or a totally dead camera.
So went for all the alkalines i had at home, two new and two already partly depleted (i got them from a keyboard): the camera was finally working!
Yesterday i went to the supermarket and, being no AA lithium batteries available, i purchased a set of eight alkalines, the best ones specifically advertised for digital SRL's.
When i tried them on the camera i got no sign of life!
I took them out, tried to slightly bend the contacts, and put them in place: no life again!
I took back the other batteries i have tried (two so-and-so new ones and two partly depleted, as reported before) and everything was back again!
Very odd!
I tried again the new batteries and this time they worked!
It's a complete mistery to me.
Did it happen to anybody else?
The strange thing is that if the batteries work, they work again when you swich off and on again the camera as many time as you like. If they don't work the first time, no success in trying to switch back and forth the camera switch.
Its' very strange, because i put the battery inside, and closed the door, the same way every time, and the result varies a great deal from one time to another!
I could try to clean all the contacts with nail polish, but somehow i suspect that the problem lies elsewhere. A dirty contact can't cut the power one time, and give fully charged batteries the next try.
I am sorry if the subject has already been discussed, i did a search, but i understand now that probably i didn't use the best keywords... but i am not of english mother language. after all
have fun
CJ