On 9/20/06 9:19 AM, "Digital Image Studio", <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Pentax's expertise as far as I am aware is lens and camera body > design. In the case of Pentax DSLR design I'm pretty sure that their > engineers would simply be drawing on available modular electronics > from specialty manufacturers be they either off the shelf items or > specially specified. Obviously they are now even collaborating on lens > design. Pentax now has a large contingency of the image processing engineers. They were on the hiring binge of these engineers a few years ago (a bit more). Some of the folks in Japan were surprised to see the hiring ads even in commuting trains. I think they have been TRULY concentrating on beefing up everything digital. Re hardware mfg, by the nature of the camera mfg, I assume there have not been any significant changes but again, they are concentrating on packaging more compact components etc. Re lens, what they are doing is primarily to reduce the cost (read: change more toward plastic barrels etc) but the optical design stays in-house. With Tokina, they went a great length to explain that it was NOT an OEM arrangement. However, if they see any Tokina lenses with good optical design, they package them into Pentax lenses. DFA Macros are good examples. Then they are apparently developing their own new line of lenses with SDM (or SSM?:-). I think they have been concentrating their resources more on "digitalizing" their offerings. They have been taking a good few years to drop old FA's and apparently overhauling and renewing the lens lines. That's why we saw FA's and FA*s suddenly dropped out of our sight. We should probably see what they have been doing up to date next week :-). Ken -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
