I had a chance to visit with my friend Tom this weekend. I mentioned him recently, he is using several K-xs in the high school photo classes that he teaches. He mentioned that the reliability of the kit lenses is horrible. They break very easily. I didn't find the exact failure mode, other than that they are flimsy. He did say that once he gets the kids to use primes, (IIRC some manual focus era 50mm), the kids quickly seem to much prefer the old primes to the zoom lenses. It warms my heart that there does seem to be hope for the new generation. He also said that he's had problems with at least two LCDs simply stop working. The cameras still take pictures, you just can't see anything on the LCD. They've been off to Pentax and back for repair.
I have no idea how other brands fare as student cameras, but consistent multiple failures is a serious issue. Is there anyone at Pentax I could point him to? At the very least, they might find his class a good source of "torture testing", as the cameras probably get a lot more usage than the vast majority of entry level cameras. His problems are kind of a shame, because I think that a big part of the reason that the K1000 was such an iconic student camera was its robustness. -- Larry Colen [email protected] sent from i4est -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
