By selecting your period carefully, you can prove anything. Many people thought they were millionaires in 2001, until the dotcom bubble burst.
You are a pro photographer who needs tools that Pentax doesn't provide. You would be mad not to switch brands. But that doesn't mean that Pentax is about to disappear, and there is something depressing about your apparent need to prove that it is.
If I put as much effort into this as you seem to, I am sure I could prove that Canon is about to go under. All one needs to do is identify one negative trend and extrapolate it until Kingdom come. It's easy to do, but it's not actually reality.
John
On Mon, 4 Apr 2005 22:21:04 -0400, Herb Chong <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
what i relate is not specific to Pentax. all of the digital camera makers in Japan are facing a wall. the domestic market is saturated and is shrinking with price wars about to begin even in the high profit DSLR market. entry models are already much lower in margins than a year ago. the Americas has shown significant slowdown in the past 6 months. the only market not slowing down drastically is Europe but even that is showing signs of doing the same in the next 6 months. sometime in the next 1 to 2 years, the DSLR market will saturate.
in 2004, Japanese manufacturers shipped 372K DSLR units domestically and 2.1M units overseas. this means that 15% of DSLR production by Japanese manufacturers went to domestic sales. the numbers are worse than i said. you wanted to know the actual numbers. there they are. the numbers are reported in any number of technology news sources. Canon and Nikon together accounted for between 2.1 to 2.3 million of the 2.5m units produced. Canon hasn't stated its final numbers yet while Nikon has said they have produced over 1m D70 bodies. this means that in terms of market share, Pentax's share is shrinking because it is not growing as fast as its competition, even though it is growing too.
i have decided for Canon because Pentax shows no signs of making a body that will do what i need from a camera to make a living. i have been a Pentax owner for 30 years and never pushed the envelope until a couple of years ago. now i am and Pentax tells me that to upgrade and stay digital, i have to buy into a new camera system. $12K of Pentax glass and bodies is being left behind whether i choose Pentax or Canon because my 35mm lenses are useless on either upgrade path. what Pentax doesn't seem to get is that there isn't a lot of time left.
Herb... ----- Original Message ----- From: "John Forbes" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, April 04, 2005 9:43 PM Subject: Re: DS Doing Well in Japan
You don't even have the intellectual rigour to distinguish between a country and a region, and you claim that "the Japanese domestic market doesn't account for a lot of any of the manufacture's total sales". Next you say that Pentax makes 30-40% of its sales in Japan.
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