Well, my shiny new Ricoh GR IV worked great for the first 23 hours. It’s not a huge upgrade over the GR III — it’s generally an incremental upgrade. Better, yes, but you really have to do some serious rationalizing to justify the massive price increase (the GR III was released in 2019 at $899; the new GR IV is $1499).
But I’ve been a huge fan of the GR series for many years and still have my GR II and GR III. And once you’re hooked, the GR series cameras have a way of convincing you that it’s worth it. So I’ve been so looking forward to the GR IV.
But it didn’t quite make it to 24 hours because the “Lens Error” defect appeared. And it’s a showstopper error.
When you power the camera on, it makes loud grinding sounds as it tries to retract the lens and then shows “Lens error.” on the back screen and promptly powers off. So there’s nothing you can do — it’s just dead.
There’s nothing jamming the lens, and it hasn’t been out in dusty or sandy conditions, so there’s no grit or foreign debris stuck in there. I’d even been storing it in the leather case that I use with my GR III (the GR IV fits in it perfectly, by the way).
Powering off and on again and removing the battery didn’t do anything. You can’t access the menu system to do anything there. And no, I am not going to start jostling or twisting the lens just to get it to work properly.
And it seems I’m not the first to run into this problem, although given the scarcity of these cameras in the US for now, most of the reports seem to be from Asian users so far. (There have been reports of another issue related to the front dial, but I didn’t run into that one.)
I don’t have a solution or fix for it, unfortunately. But I’m posting this because I suspect I won’t be the only one to run into it, and there’s some reassurance in knowing that it’s not you, it’s the camera.
I’ve returned mine for a refund. As much as I’d like to exchange it, that wouldn’t be quick, given the waitlist for the trickle of new cameras Pentax is supplying. And I’m going to hold off until the problem is actually solved rather than risk getting another defective camera that I can’t rely on. It’s clearly a mechanical design flaw, and I can’t imagine there’s any way that it can or will be fixed with a firmware update.
In the meantime, it makes me seriously question my loyalty to the GR series. The combination of it being very much an incremental update, the massive price hike, and there being so much more competition now in this space now makes it much less of a sure thing that I will actually end up buying the GR IV (again) down the line.
I had basically the same thing happen to my first GR III. It lasted a couple of weeks, but then the lens got stuck out. In that instance, I got a replacement. That was back in 2019. Pentax has had plenty of time to fix the design flaw, including a GR IIIx in the interim. Why they still haven’t fixed it is beyond infuriating and, frankly, leaves a rather sour taste.
I don’t know how common this error is, but it would seem tied to the decision to have a retracting the lens that goes in an out ever time the power cycles. That keeps the profile small, but it does introduce literal moving parts to go wrong. And clearly they do go wrong at least sometimes.
Internal memory vs memory card
This experience sealed the deal for me in terms of the importance of using a memory card rather than relying primarily on the GR IV’s newly large internal memory.
If the camera becomes unresponsive, you might not be able to access the images and footage that’s saved in the camera’s internal storage. Whereas, if you’ve used a memory card as a primary storage space, you can simply remove the memory card and retrieve the data with a memory card reader on your computer.
