On 21/03/2012 9:39 AM, Tom C wrote:
After thinking about it, I suspect Pentax is, in a way, stuck in a
catch-22. They'd have to increase production to sell in the big
presence retail stores, and they can't really fund increased
production unless they increase sales.
I do see a lot more advertising on line for Pentax. That was almost
non-existent back in 2003/2004.
For whatever reasons, ranging from the incompetence of Pentax from the
mid 1980s onwards to not having the funding for heavy R&D, Pentax has
become a very small player in the camera market.
Canon has the full financial backing of Canon, which is now primarily a
business machine company with a fairly large wart on it's foot called a
camera company. Nikon has the support of it's parent company, Mitsubishi
Heavy Industries, Sony is, well, Sony. Enough said.
Pentax never has had that kind of resource base, and it cost them dearly
by not having the heavy R&D budgets when emerging technologies started
to show up on cameras.
They didn't have the resources to make world class AF film cameras, and
so their sales eroded. It was very hard to sell an SF-1 when the
customer had just finished operating an EOS 650, The SF-1 was a clunker
by comparison.
And on it went, fewer sales meant fewer resources, and this sort of
thing tends to snowball, and Pentax became the disadvantaged stepchild
of cameras until they finally became insolvent.
Hoya did them a favour by saving them from going out of business
entirely, but it was somewhat of a mixed blessing. Some pretty good
cameras came out of the merger, but Hoya seemed to think they should be
making a profit, and prices went up accordingly.
In the end, it seemed to me that Hoya decided to suck as much profit as
they could out of the camera division, with the consequence that the K5
was plagued by something like a dozen pretty major flaws, some of which
caused operational problems, some of which would just brick the camera
entirely, and they K-r is, apparently, not problem free either.
Something about the AF not working right, in much the same way that the
K5's AF is really flakey under conditions where it should work.
However, the Hoya strategy of making Pentax at least appear profitable
might actually end up having a good ending. Ricoh does appear to be
taking somewhat of an interest in seeing the camera division grow, and
like Canon, Mitsubishi and Sony, they have the deep pockets to make
something happen, including being able to ramp up production to big box
store levels.
Do remember though, that Pentax does have pretty good market visibility
in countries other than the USA. America, no matter how self important
she may be, is just one market, and Pentax Imaging is not Pentax, it's
just a marketing company (that apparently doesn't know how to market).
I live in a city of less than 200,000 people, and I can walk into 2
camera stores and buy a Pentax DSLR if I want to, and Pentax is actually
very well represented in Canada (although in camera stores, not Best Buy
style outlets).
However, as an up to now small company, it is very likely that they
can't A) meet the volume demands of box stores and B) may not wish to
take the potential financial hit that goes along with selling out of box
stores.
--
William Robb
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