Cesar M. wrote: > Just because it is a 'flagship' does not mean that it will work > perfectly out of the box. As a matter of fact I have owned four Pentax > cameras since new - Super Program, LX, ZX-5, and MZ-S. The Super Program is > the only one that never had a need for warranty work.
Yet Pentax has the best reliability rating in the industry--better than Nikon or Canon. Or Leica, for that matter. It just goes to show you that you can have "out of the box" problems with any make and brand of camera. Typically, camera companies do the best they can to foresee problems and make the product bulletproof before initial launch (it's a very stark equation: warrantee returns = money down the drain for the company), but think of what happens when the product launches--suddenly you have a large group of people of widely varying skills testing EVERY SINGLE CAMERA thoroughly. It's not something that any company can simulate before the actual launch. So during the first year, the company is learning a lot about what works and what doesn't, whether any problems are cropping up systematically or there are only isolated separate incidents. It's a nerve-wracking time in the development of a new product, because, typically, users who have problems are not shy about spreading the word. Now with the Internet, negative stories spread like wildfire. So if you have one guy who had a DOA and returned his new camera for another brand, you can be sure he's going to be badmouthing your product all over the place--and then that others who have no firsthand experience are going to be repeating the stories they heard. As a magazine editor, I found it was like a minefield--I had to very carefully judge whether reliability problems I was hearing about were isolated incidents or evidence of problem trends. It's very embarrassing for an editor to publish a glowing review of a product only to find later that it has suffered from obvious reliability problems. (Well, I should say that it was embarrassing to ME...I'm sure editors of certain other magazines either don't care or never even know). I made my share of mistakes, but for the most part I think I did pretty well. A good example is the Leica R8. It was a big introduction for Leica, an important product--it had raised capital with a public stock offering and spent it, more or less, on R&D for the R8, which was supposed to give some much-needed revitalization to the R line. Unfortunately, they had misstepped. The R8 is a notable recent market flop--it was embraced by R shooters but didn't bring any new users to the R line. The camera design, I think, is awful--ugly, ungainly to hold, and underfeatured for a premium deluxe SLR of its class and year of introduction. Cameras don't exist in a vaccuum--a camera that is great today will not necessarily make it in the marketplace tomorrow. Leica had made a great camera for maybe ten years earlier. In design it was long in the tooth on its first day on the market. It also had far too many reliability problems. After its introduction I had a good review of the camera in-house, but I held off publishing it because I kept hearing of warrantee repairs being needed. Were these just a few bad reports circulating around the internet, or a trend? I finally decided that, on balance, there were simply too many such reports. Significantly, I also heard from a number of R shooters who essentially LIKED the camera who had had problems--in some cases, requiring more than one warrantee return. So I held off publishing the article (it may have been published in _PT_ since I left, I don't know). There is simply no way for a magazine editor to acknowledge reliability problems because we cannot substantiate them. Only the company has warrantee return figures and, if the figures are not pretty, they will not release them. But I wasn't going to publish a positive review and appear to be endorsing the camera if I knew that buyers were having significant numbers of problems. I've heard from some contacts at Pentax who are going to get "a good answer" out of Japan as to whether rewind jams have indeed been a pattern with the MZ-S. It doesn't look that way so far, but one never knows. In the meantime, with ANY new camera, not just the MZ-S, and without being a toady for the industry, I'd counsel just a bit of forbearance with problems encountered with newly-introduced products. Give the company a chance to make amends; chances are they're doing their best. --Mike - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
