K20D won't take photo with lens on it - Communication / Mount issue?

Hi everyone. I am new here, just registered as I am trying to find out how to fix this K20D that I was given by a friend who was going to throw it away. When he gave it to me, the mount had come off and was attached to the lens. I screwed the mount properly back onto the body. The camera will take a picture no problem without a lens attached, (just white of course) but when I put the 18-55mm that I have on it, it can see the f/stop, but the exposure numbers just flash on and off, and focus will not work, depressing shutter renders a big fat nothing! I have tried the lens on another camera, works fine. Any ideas for me? Thanks!

Daniel C

Sounds like the camera has suffered a pretty dramatic trauma. I think it unlikely that you'll fix it, but well done for trying.

From your description, the camera behaves differently whether a lens is attached or not.

From that we can conclude that there is some electrical continuity between lens and body, but probably not all. I suggest investigating the electrical connections to the body mount.

Thing is, if the body has suffered a big enough impact to rip the mount from the body, there is a high probability that something else other than just the mount is damaged.

Try in manual mode, and with manual focus set.

A lens with an aperture ring might be handy.

does the auto focus work?
Does the green button stop down metering work?
Does Aperture mode work?

I rather suspect that screwing the mount back on isn't enough, how did you reconnect ann the electrical contacts?

Thanks for the answers everyone.

Dougf8, I have tried manual everything, to no avail. No auto focus or A mode. I could get a cheap MF Pentax off eBay to test if that would work, then?

Ken, I did not see anything to reconnect, just screwed it back on. Twice now

Peter, I do not know what happened to the camera. It was going to be thrown away, I saved it. At the very least, I will sell it on eBay for parts and get something...