Pentax K5 IIS - really reliable?

Hi, my name is Witek, normally I like to read forums not write something but this time I decided to put a few words as a warning.

I bought my Pentax k5 IIs something about 4 months ago and now I am really disappointed. I am not professional photographer but I love to take photos so it was very important for me to buy some good photo camera, the moments in life will not repeated. I was using different photo cameras, among others Pentax Optio MX4, Sony Alpha 300, Nikon 5100 and now I was thinking about full frame but, after reading a lot of good comments, I decided on K5 IIS and after 4 months it started to take wrong photos. Some of photos are like split on half horizontally, half photo is ok, half has wrong pink/violet colour, sometimes just horizontal line is seen in the middle of photo.
This is the first photo camera which is behaving in this way for me. The newest, the best. How can you believe in the reliability? The best was to buy new one and go on holiday, or on the important party. I just want to say be very carefully when you decide to buy this one.
I am really interested how many people had a problems with the newest Pentax product because for me it is unthinkable that the Pentax flagship product breaks down after three or four months of use.

Normally they are very reliable and have no widely reported issues, sounds like it could be sensor failure which is unlucky in your case...take it back to the dealer and I'm sure it will be sorted asap

Simon

I'm pretty sure Canon, Nikon and Sony have their fair share of camera failures as well

Sounds like a dodgy memory card to me. I had an Adata Class 6s 16GB card that would show symptoms like this before I binned it.

Good call, I read something similar on another forum (canon 5D MKII) and it turned out to be the memory card.

Is this the case with different SD cards? If there was a write error to the card, this could happen.

Is the preview photo on the screen OK? is it just when you go back to the picture or upload to a PC?

So it seems:

Canon 5D light leak

Nikon D600 dust issue

Nikon D800 left focusing problem

Witek, I hope your problem will be solved quickly....

You are probably right about sensor because on the "raw" photos you can see the some problems. I am just really unhappy and upset all of this situation. Now I will have to wait for long time to get repaired this camera instead of taking photos and after all how long will it work? For now I will have to go back to my Cyber-shot HX5, it is just compact but is working without problems.

My memory card is SanDisk Extreme Pro 95MB/s 16GB. I didn't try another one so I will try this approach. That would be quite interesting.

Unfortunately SanDisk are the most counterfeited memory card. If you bought it new to go with the camera, AND you bought it from somewhere like eBay, then you might have a dodgy card.

SanDisk offer a lifetime warranty, so if it's a genuine card get in touch with them and they'll sort it.

In the mean time, try another card.

Thanks for info. I bought this photo camera and memory card by the internet but from the "real shop". I mean this is not just internet shop but "conventional" one , everything was new but I am going definitly to try another memory card, not at this moment but today or tomorrow. I would be really nice surprised if it could work for me.

I observe the problem on preview screen as well as on the photos checked later from the memory card.

I've got just now some another Samsung memory card so I am going to try it today and tomorrow. If it showed that it worked I would have to say really sorry for Pentax

the memory card replacement didn't help. I have to go to the service with my photo camera.

Bad luck, unrepresentative though generally I think, excepting sensor stains At least you know they have plenty of practise fixing dodgy sensors.
4 months old? Probably a straight replacement.