the cost of the part would have been minimal, but the assembly line tooling wouldn't have been. for a camera that has to cost Pentax at most $500 to make, and probably under $400, a production run of well under 100K, on a brand new line, when the company had lost money for 3 years in a row before, it had to cut all costs possible. they had no intention of full support from the beginning and the firmware update was a fortuitous coincidence of the hardware design. new lenses going forth aren't going to have aperture rings and everything A and forward works fully. they made a good business decision to drop full support for pre A lenses. with the faster drop in price than planned and significantly lower than forecast sales, the *istD could net losing money anyway.
Herb... ----- Original Message ----- From: "Peter J. Alling" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, September 24, 2004 10:43 AM Subject: Re: istDs - what a great camera! > That's right tooling and assembly jigs cost considerably more, if it's > designed in from the beginning the additional cost > can be minuscule. In this case it probably would have been.
