DA* motor failure rate

As regards warranty, it depends where you are, but in the UK there are Pentax Pro dealers who offer 2 years. SRS are the obvious favourite around here, bust also Park Cameras and others.

Sometimes even Amazon can be a useful source.

Is there an early warning? My 16-50 will occasionally refuse to do anything, but a detach and reattach sorts it out until the next time. To be fair, both it and the K5 could do with a proper clean as it seems more contact related, but if these are early signs of impending failure, I'd like to address it.

You'll hear a lot about lens failures if you are a regular on the forums - which is where you are likely to find a cluster of disgruntled users - how many lenses as a proportion of those sold will never be known although Pentax might have a rough estimate through lenses coming into their repair workshops but other lenses will be repaired through other channels or by using technical flair to get some more life out of the defective item.

You only have to go on somewhere like DPreview to realise the issues affecting other manufacturers (1D3 AF, D600 oil spots, wonky horizons etc etc) are abundant.

I took 100,000 pictures with my old, now semi retired, K-7 and a huge amount of those with the DA*16-50 attached in every weather condition you could imagine, even had snow building up on the camera and lens, and it never had a problem!

At last a couple of sensible posts. Cheers to the Welsh.

When there was a genuine and common problem (the K5 stained sensor) Pentax acted promptly and publicly and replaced all affected cameras free of charge.

Where there is a less common problem, which doesn't affect the majority of users, then I am happy for them to say nothing but to deal fairly with those who do have a problem. People who think that a manufacturer is going to beat his breast publicly about every little fault are deluding themselves.

Nobody outside Pentax has any idea how many 16-50s had a problem, but you can bet that people who had a faulty lens made sure everybody knew about it. And often on several different websites, which exaggerates the scale of the problem.

I am quite sure that the figures posted on another site bear very little relation to reality. My 16-50 was a new one, and exhibited no problems at all for three years, until I left it on the roof of a car and drove off. I suppose I should have blamed Pentax for that, but I didn't.

G

At least that was only your lens where as this person, link and I have to assume you were not using weed George.

Best regards

Sadly, it was age, rather than weed, that was responsible.

It's also sad that lenses don't bounce as well as babies.

G

This is one of those personal experience type situations.

Personally I have owned

1x 16x50 where the SDM died and lens was replaced after 8 months approx

1x 50-135 where the SDM failed and was 'repaired' so badly 3 times over a year that I demanded a replacement and got it when it was approx 2.5 years old

Also when I first tried a DA* 300 the SDM was dead out of the box and they had to get another out of stock, so my personal experience is that SDM reliability is poor.

A Pentax engineer has stated on record that "these lenses was prone to failure from the get-go due to their design"

So, bad design and a high failure rate is what I get from my own personal experience, make of that what you will.

Now, on to another point that totally winds me up, can everyone please get off of the "Pentax pro dealer, 2 year warranty" script, please. In the Uk we are all covered by the Sale of Goods Act. This entitles us to goods that are both 'fit for purpose' and 'free from defects' The law DOES NOT dictate 1 or 2 years warranty like everyone on here likes to mention.

The fact that a Pentax employee has stated on record that the SDM failure is due to a design defect is enough for everyone to get their SDM lenses fixed by Pentax for free. You have 6 years under UK consumer law to make a claim, so can you all please stop paying to get them fixed, stand up for your rights and get what you are entitled to.

Remember all warranties always state (because they have to by law!) that 'this warranty does not affect your statutory rights', so stop quoting warranty and start demanding your statutory rights instead.

Ah, but the statutory rights are not as clear cut as all that. In the first six months the onus is on the supplier to prove an item was not defective. After that, the onus is on the buyer to show that the item was defective. This is an area for argument and negotiation and, finally, the law.

A 2 year warranty is just that. It fails within two years, they fix it. And it's quite true it has no effect on our statutory rights.

New update from me, regarding my 3rd DA* lens...the 300

which makes me think that some of the failures are not failures, but reflect that storage (even correctly) of the lens might cause focussing to malfunction....

yesterday I was at Marwell, spent most of the time with the Sigma 150-500 then I fancied swapping to the DA*300, the focussing just did not want to cooperate, even manually. Drat, I thought, another £180. But I remembered that when this happended to my DA*60-250 post-repair the use of a jeweller's screwdriver in the AF screw released the mechanism so that after a few minutes the AF on manual and SDM was working fine.

How many people try this before sending the lens off for repair? I think maybe more people do now as awareness of the problem is widespread.

Really ... you honestly thought Drat ?

I think not

I had to use family friendly terminology, otherwise I'd be stopped by his Rileyness...you probably heard me cursing, was in your neck of the woods (well, Hampshire:roll.....actually, since I couldn't manually focus the lens I sort of knew it wasn't terminal failure - I just wonder how many people have had their lenses repaired when just a twiddle with the jeweller's screwdriver frees up movement....

I regularly put my DA* lenses on a AF film body to 'exercise' the screw drive mechanism. Then again I turn aperture rings and focusing barrels on all my lenses every month. I also make a point of priming and firing shutters on all my cameras

I am sire I was told that it was the right thing to do back in the 70's or maybe I have too much time on my hands.

Regards Steve

Most mechanical devices like being in use so I expect SDM lenses are no exception. With an in body motor that's getting used all the time, so little to worry about there. But a lens that's only used every few months might just get lazy and need a push to get it going again?

I'm only guessing, but it seems reasonable. Our 18-135mm lenses haven't been a problem, but they get used all the time.

My DA* 16-50mm was dead when I mounted it on the K-5II a couple of weeks ago (first time in probably 6 months or more). Couple of manual turns of the focus ring and it soon came back to life.