On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 3:28 AM, Paul Stenquist <[email protected]> wrote: >> Seems to be a done deal by the Hoya press release. I just hope it's >> not bad news for Ricoh owners. That would be an annoyance. > > It would be a much bigger annoyance in these parts if it were bad news for > Pentax owners, but I assume it will be good news for all concerned.
I do hope that it is a plus for all concerned. :-) Ricoh's a pretty good sized company. They have a lot of camera and lens expertise, just not in the DSLR or Medium Format Digital space. My impression is that they've been doing pretty well and have not been at risk, but I haven't been looking at that. It's Pentax that's had the financial problems and has now been bought twice. So I think we have to consider this from the Ricoh perspective, since it is Ricoh buying the Pentax brand and technology from Hoya, not Pentax driving the deal. Pentax is essentially being split up, the camera portion of the company separated from the medical portion. I feel the mainstream SLR domain is coming to a close and the mirrorless digital camera on the rise. In the mirrorless domain, Ricoh has been very innovative with the GXR system. The "Camera Module A12" with Leica M mount is just about ready to ship for the GXR system: it would be extremely easy to provide adaptation for K-mount (it already exists through third party adapters!) and not too much more daunting to build a dedicated K-mount version, with more features dedicated to the Pentax K mount lens specifics. And creating dedicated A12 camera modules with integrated lenses like the DA21, FA43, DA40, DA70 (all great, compact optics) would be another way to expand Ricoh's GXR system more swiftly than for them to develop the optics from scratch. It will be very interesting to see where this goes. I do hope it's a positive for everyone ... including the medical products market! -- Godfrey godfreydigiorgi.posterous.com -- 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.
