Barry I think you can take the field tester award in the consumer-prosumer area,
if nothing else you have certainly shed some light on the state of play in that area with Pentax and Nikon products, they LOOK like the real thing and most likely feel like the real thing but that’s about it, if you buy one you pays your money and you takes your chances, and none of em at very good odds by the sound of it.
Makes one wonder if the wheel has fallen off at Nikon and how long their customer base will put up with that kind of effort? Let’s hope the other models like the D600 and D800 don’t suffer from such mayhem.
I guess you didn’t have much option but to get the A57, it seems to be making plenty of owners happy enough, except for only having one dial at the front (like the KM5D), and no lens fine tune (I’ve never needed it, but with lower Mp’s maybe you don’t…don’t know on that one), also no auto ISO in M mode and I don’t know how reliable the flash system is…I haven’t noticed too many complaints so far.
Greg
Ps I was just browsing through this
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/thread/3291451 and one guy reported he had back focus on a lens (don’t know what lens) and was complaining about there being no way to adjust the focus plane on that level of camera, and there are complaints about the zoom button, picture effect button, and ? button being non re-programmable if you always shoot RAW, the first two don’t do anything in RAW anyway…JPEG only.