Unexpected Expense

Late last year my camera (K1 11), the card slot 1 stopped working. I bought some compressed air from Amazon and blasted the slot. No change. I contact my local Pentax deler and they said if I took it to them the would look at. They looked at it and decided it needed to be sent away for repair to John Pye. Had a phone call earlier this week, £720 for a new electronic board. I don't, and the dealer doesn't, understand why? You could not see the contacts in the slot, is that why?

Electronics, not fit for purpose.

Seems very expensive.

You could buy a nearly new replacement camera for less than twice that amount.

Unfortunately there seems to be a trend these days to replace electronic boards rather than repairing them. I'm guessing this is not unique to Pentax brand.

Consumer protection needs to be strengthened in the UK when spending large amounts on gear like this...either a California style 'Right to Repair' where manufacturers have to provide parts, tools, documentation and software to consumers or independent repairers at the same price they sell to their authorised service centres for 7 years after the item was last manufactured...or the warranty needs to be more than it is currently for items costing say over £1000...a minimum of 3 years wouldn't be unreasonable.

Assuming you could still use slot no.2...hope so!

Regards

Karlo

I wouldn't pay it. An extra £180 gets you a working K-1 with two card slots, and one card slot is enough for your current camera to deliver good shots. Just pretend it's a "Pentax KP Mark II" with a huge sensor!

And if you want a decent K-1ii, you can sell the faulty one and still pay less than £720 total for a good replacement.

Presumably VAT takes care of £120 of that £720. Of the remaining £600, how many hours of skilled labour does it take to dismantle then reassemble a flagship DSLR? And that's before the cost of a circuit board. Then there's probably things like cleaning the sensor and replacing seals (even my watch gets a new seal if anything is done to it internally). Not to mention testing before and after reassembly. The cost of the circuit board might be only a small part of the total cost. A long while ago, someone in the motor trade told me how much it cost to fix the air-con in a Porsche. It was frightening. And by far the biggest expense was the labour involved in removing bits to get the the air-con then putting it all back together again. Yet another good reason why I've never wanted a Porsche!

Steve

Thanks for all your comments, I did consider only using slot 2 but I thought that might be the next to go if the circuit board is faulty.
I also don't like buying second hand for "cheap" items which is why I am having it repared.

I doubt the circuit board would be problematic to cause the loss of a single slot. Both card slots will be controlled by the same IC. If that was fault, the camera wouldn't read from either slot.

My guess is that some dirt/obstruction found itself into the slot and caused a contact to move out of place. Either that or a fault may have caused a fuse to trip for just the one slot. Again that shouldn't impact the other slot.

Assuming the £720 is essentially a rebuild, I suspect the camera will be 'serviced' as part of that work and essentially you will be getting a camera that is as good as new. If you intend on using the camera for a few more years yet, until Ricoh get their act together and bring out a new K-mount camera, you'll be fine.

My K-1 is coming up to 10 years old (as is my D500), and neither owe me anything. Replacing the D500 is the bigger headache as that hasn't been adequately replaced so hoping there are plenty of years of life left in both bodies.