I admire Pentax for trying to imagine new kind of products like it is with the Pentax Q and K-o1 cameras. But is it really paying off? Digicaminfo (Click here) found an article at Nikkei (you have to pay to read it) where Ricoh confirms that they will release a cheaper than the K-01 mirrorless camera. The K-01 sells (body only) for $700 at Amazon. The new camera will have use “cheaper” material to cut costs. It has to be seen if the design will change or not.
21 Responses
Change the design and charge $100 more. That’ll help move a bunch of camera for pentax.
Better yet, drop the designer and save the money. 🙂
Clueless Pentax.
Where is the rumored 16MP Ricoh GXR? I hope they did not axe that one for this ugly chunky brick!
change the color, give it away for free and i may use it.
I wonder how Pentax and Ricoh will operate beside one another in the next five years. It was said that Ricoh would expand distribution globally (I mean Ricoh in Australia is really only know for printers these days, even though they had some success here with cameras in the 80’s) but I’m not so sure seeing as they have Pentax now.
It would be great to see a team-up of sorts for a flagship camera. Ricoh’s UI and early 90’s utilitarian look but with Pentax lens mount, pricing and wide distribution.
Yes, Mr Bond. But for that extra $100 put in a proper eye-level viewfinder.
i think they compete in making the ugliest cameras…. anyway the winner will be inhouse.
Change the damn design. Make it like the MX and I will go buy it!
Why dont Ricoh just do a digital digital FF variant of the old analogue Ricoh GR-1? It would outsell almost everything on the market.
A mirrorless system camera with a 35mm sensor is a pipe dream, unless you go for the Leica M9. However a dedicated module for the Ricoh GXR system is probably the only viable alternative.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/10/us-sony-idUSBRE83907220120410
the sony system is dead before it has even started.
who will buy into a sony system when it´s verly likely that they drop the camera business over the next 3 years!!
6.4 billion net loss…. they have no money to do R&D for expensive high end stuff.
ricoh and pentax are dead soon too…..
Yeah I highly doubt that an imaging juggernaut that is Pentax Ricoh, is going to die anytime soon. Especially when sensor design and optics are still a Japanese specialty. Ricoh is not a very visible brand but are quite profitable, especially in photocopying.
Sony is indeed in trouble and will scale back in a few segments but I highly doubt they’ll remove themselves from the camera industry entirely. Remember that their imaging department is wide-reaching, and the resident bean-counters would love that R&D can be spent on professional rigs and work its way down to the compacts. That tech is sold to the likes of Nikon, Pentax etc.
It’s more likely they’ll exit the highly competitive TV unit market, maybe e-readers too and scale back everything else.
Not that this article had really anything to do with Sony….
sony will cut the alpha cameras.. and produce consumer crap like the NEX system. only to notice in a few years that nobody buys that anymore, because of mobile phones with 20MP cameras (good enough for facebook shooter).
pentax is a small company by itself… no juggernaut… ricoh will do photocopy systems… yeah great for us photographers i guess.
the real question is who buys ricoh cameras? i have not seen one here in europe for the past 2 years.
pentax = kodak
Pentax needs to reduce the mount to sensor distance, then include an adapter for K mount lenses, that will make the body way more attractive to shooters.
pentax should stop making cameras.
they are only producing crap and they don´t even make a profit.. so why trying?
I don’t agree. Pentax just need to focus on what they do best: compact DSLR.
I replaced my Canon 7D with a K5 and have no regret. The IQ (Raw) of K5 is so good that I use less and less of my FF (currently A850).
K5 uses the same Sony sensor as the Nikon D7000 and it managed to beat D7000 in DxO rating. That means if Pentax have the will, they are capable to produce a FF camera that can at least match the D800, if not better (in still department), considering D800 is a grownup version of D7000.
What bothering me is that as a small company, Pentax spent so much of their limited resources in weird cameras like Q and K-01.
Give us a compact FF DSLR with an adapter for the 645 lenses, focus on the improvement on the next K5 and its spin-offs, and forget about the Q and K-01, then Pentax could regain its place in the market place.
Sony can’t even meet demand right now for its NEX-7 camera and 50mm OSS e-mont lens. Whenever there is stock of the machine it quickly sells out. You dont kill off a division of your company cranking out money like the camera division, of Sony,
I have read these same type of silly comments about some impending doom for Leica many times too (Leica can’t keep up with demand for its super expensive offerings).
Sony is loosing money on it’s TV’s, the margins are too thin and companies like Visio are eating their lunch, It’s getting it’s ass handed to it with film studio cost. It was idiotic for Sony to think it could run a studio, but all they could think about was the vertical integration pipe dream.
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