On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 11:00:29AM -0600, William Robb scripsit: > ----- Original Message ----- From: "John Francis" > > By going to a micro 4/3 camera complete with EVF Pentax will be > > able to achieve the "smaller, lighter" goal that Hoya seem to have > > in mind. A camera with a 36x24mm sensor will not. > > I hope you are wrong about the EVF part, unless they get several > magnitudes of quality better. I haven't seen one yet that I think is > usable. Apparently the Lumix DMC G1 is supposed to be a good one, and > it gave me a headache in less than half a minute of using it.
While getting rid of as many parts as possible is a good idea (better reliability, lower cost), there needs to be some market differentiation. I suspect that APS-C, "DSLR performance", K mount lenses, weather sealing, and optical viewfinders are all part of the intended market differentiation for Pentax. Note that Panasonic is a consumer electronics company; Pentax (and Hoya) are optical companies. They don't want to wander out of the area of their strengths into those of the competition, which is what moving to an EVF would do. Also (and more speculatively) note that there's been a very large R&D effort put into optical switching over the last thirty years. It's quite possible that the mirror box replacement will be some sort of electronically switched nanoscale coating. (All sorts of these have been demonstrated in the lab, starting around 1990.) Pragmatically, if that thing on top of the K-7 is an EVF, you're likely right. If it's a full-view, full magnification pentaprism, I'm going to suggest that it means I'm right, at least as far as "optical viewfinder" being included in the intended market differentiation strategy goes. -- Graydon -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
