Pentax Announces 35mm Half-frame Film Camera
Coming in summer with manual film winding and a lens based on the Espio Mini
By cjfeola in Pentax Announcements on Mar 1, 2024
The first half-frame camera in Pentax's storied film history will ship this summer, according to Film Project Designer Takeo "TKO" Suzuki. The camera will feature manual film winding and rewinding, an electronic shutter, automatic exposure control, and a lens with the same 25mm field of view of the Ricoh Auto Half, with the optical design based on the Pentax Espio Mini.
TKO made the announcement in a new video dropped on the Pentax Film Project web page early March 1 (Tokyo time).
As in previous videos, TKO started by thanking everyone for the outpouring of worldwide support for The Pentax Film Project. He said the project has a working prototype, and he'd been out shooting with it. "
Ricoh Camera Business: Strong and Growing
Ricoh reports Q3 results; cameras remain a bright spot
By cjfeola in Photo Industry News on Feb 14, 2024
Ricoh reported 3rd quarter financial results to investors on Feb. 6, and once again singled out the results of Ricoh Imaging and Pentax. “The camera business remained strong and sales increased,” Ricoh reported. Strong results from the company’s Ricoh Imaging division — which includes Pentax cameras and lenses, and the Ricoh GR III series — have become a regular feature of Ricoh’s quarterly and annual reports to investors over the past few years.
Overall, Ricoh otherwise reported results that were somewhat mixed for the 3rd Quarter of Fiscal 2024, which covered October to December of 2023. Office services sales were up; the thermal printer business continued to miss targets because of weak demand in the US and Europe.
“Operating income has been revised downward to 60 billion yen…it will not be possible to make up for the shortfall in production revenue in the first half,” Ricoh reported to investors.
That means that the stronger financial performance of the 3rd quarter and projected for the 4th quarter will not be enough to make up for the weak results of the first two quarters.
The overall Ricoh conglomerate has struggled with weak sales of office machines and services since the much of the workforce stopped going to the office during the pandemic. And while the pandemic is over, the workforce has not returned to the office; occupancy remains considerably below pre-pandemic levels.
But for the last two years Ricoh has consistently pointed to camera sales as a bright spot for growth and profitability. When Ricoh reported its results for Fiscal 2023, which ended March 31, 2023, the company said annual operating profits soared 97 percent, in part driven by “ongoing profitability of camera business.” The company singled out cameras as a fiscal bright spot in the Other category. (Ricoh does not break out camera sales.)
The category “significantly increased revenues and earnings from PFU consolidation and ongoing profitability of camera business. (In 2022 Ricoh acquired PFU Limited, a consolidated subsidiary of Fujitsu Limited that specialized in document scanning.)
Ricoh has continued to single out camera sales revenue and profitability growth in reports to investors, with the Feb. 6 report that “The camera business remained strong and sales increased” being the latest.
It’s important to remember that Ricoh is issuing that number as guidance to investors. Companies tend to be very conservative about such guidance because they can be criminally prosecuted and sued if they are wrong. For example, the US Securities and Exchange Commission went after Elon Musk and investors filed a class action suit after his 2028 tweet that he had “secured funding” for his Tesla electric car company.
2023 was a very good year for Pentax and Pentaxians
And a great year for Pentax Forums!
By cjfeola in Photo Industry News on Feb 4, 2024
For Ricoh Imaging and Pentax, 2023 was a very good year. And that made it a very good year for Pentaxians and Pentax Forums.
Parent Ricoh Company repeatedly cited the Ricoh Imaging division’s camera business as a profitability bright spot in an otherwise tough time for the office products and imaging giant. The shock spring release of the Pentax K-3 III Monochrome generated an avalanche of press and the better part of a year of back-orders, capped off by the Monochrome being selected as Japan Historical Camera of 2023 by the Japan Camera Foundation.
Pentax K-3 III Monochrome
The Ricoh GRIII, meanwhile, also managed to sell as fast as Ricoh Imaging could make them. Indeed, when Japan’s giant Yodobashi Camera Store — similar to B&H Foto & Electronics and Adorama in the United States – listed its Top 10 Best Selling Compact Cameras last month, the Ricoh GRIIIx Urban Edition was number 9, the Ricoh GRIII was number 6, and the Ricoh GRIIIx was number 1. And on fellow Japanese giant Mapcamera's December best sellers list, the GR IIIx was third, behind the Sony a7c II and the Nikon Zf.
Besides the Monochrome, Ricoh Imaging/Pentax introduced the Pentax-FA 50mm F1.4 Classic, the HD Pentax-FA 50mm F1.4, the K-3 III Monochrome Matte Black Edition and the GR III Diary Edition. They also became the official US Kenko distributor, announced the Pentax WG-90 tough compact camera would ship in 2024, and gave more details on the Pentax Film Project. And the company kicked off 2024 with the unveiling of the finished Pentax Film Project prototype, announcing that they intended to have it on sale soon.
Leica's Record sales in 2023 is Exceptionally Good News for Pentax
Pentax's "workingman's Leica" strategy
By cjfeola in Columns on Jan 1, 2024
2023 was “the best year in Leica’s history,” Dr. Andreas Kaufmann, majority shareholder and chairman of the supervisory board of Leica Camera AG, told the French magazine Phototrend.
Those results are driven by the sale of more than 11,000 M11s and M11 Monochroms, said Kaufmann, plus an explosion in demand for film cameras. Leica is producing almost 5,000 M6 and MP 35mm cameras this year, up from just 500 in 2015; a number previously so low that the company considered disposing of the production equipment. And the compact Leica Q3 has taken off like a rocket, according to Leica officials.
All of this is great news for Ricoh Imaging, which has staked out a strategy that mirrors Leica’s, albeit at a much lower price point, and then some.
Consider:
- Both companies have flagship product lines that stubbornly cling to systems “outmoded” by mirrorless designs: Leica’s M Series still uses the coupled-rangefinders it perfected half a century ago, while Pentax stands fast with the Single Lens Reflexes (SLRs) that dethroned those rangefinder decades ago, led by, ironically, the Pentax Spotmatic.
- Both now offer unique black-and-white only models that sell for more than their color counterparts:
- The Leica M11 Monochrom, the only black-and-white rangefinder
- The Leica Q2 Monochrom, the only black-and-white fixed-lens compact
- The Pentax K-3 III Monochrome, the only production black-and-white DSLR
- Both offer compacts that are so wildly popular that they are often on backorder: The Q3 for Leica, and the GRIII for Ricoh Imaging
- Both companies use special editions to drive sales: Leica’s Q series, for example, has offered James Bond and Reporter special editions, along with the Monochrom. Pentax takes it even further. Not only does the flagship K-3 III have special editions such as the Jet Black and the Monochrome, the latter has special editions of its own, such as the Monochrome Matte Black edition.
- Both companies have made public commitments to film. Lecia, as noted above, is selling M6s as fast as it can make them. Pentax hasn’t shipped any new film cameras yet, but it has been publicly promoting The Pentax Film Project and documenting the development of new film cameras. Pentax officials remain coy, but rumor has it that the company will ship a new compact 35mm film camera with a fixed lens in the first half of 2024.
The New "Best of Pentax Forums" Newsletter
Subscribe for free and join hundreds of Pentaxians on our improved platform
By cjfeola in Site News on Nov 20, 2023
Get the best of Pentax Forums in our improved, curated, and free "Best of Pentax Forums" weekly newsletter: sign up below or at newsletter.pentaxforums.com for our next update on Wednesday!
A bit of background: we're fortunate that Pentax Forums is such a dynamic community, but we know that it's sometimes hard to keep up with the hundreds of threads, posts, photos, and stories that appear every week. So, in late 2021, we started offering an automated digest of top content based on factors such as thread replies and likes—which, after a brief hiatus—has been back online since mid-2023. We have received overwhelmingly positive feedback from the community on this initiative.
In mid-2023, we also started offering a curated newsletter as a basic e-mail, called "Best of Pentax Forums", with hand-picked content from the forum and beyond that might otherwise go unseen, as well as special photo challenges and posts. We have been more than pleased with the result: thousands of you started reading the curated newsletter every week!
Today, we are officially launching the Best of Pentax Forums Newsletter on a new platform called Substack. We moved to Substack to take advantage of that platform's advanced advanced formatting tools that go far beyond the capabilities of our legacy e-mail platform, such as an online version of each newsletter. Our goal is to provide convenient and easily readable summaries of homepage content, as well as links to top forum threads, every Wednesday. The newsletter is available for free to all existing forum members (please create a forum account first if you don't already have one).
Like Pentax Forums accounts, the newsletter content is completely free. Substack allows you to optionally make donations called "paid newsletter subscriptions" because...well, that's what Substack calls them, and we're stuck with it. Donations through the newsletter are the same as regular forum donations and come with all the accompanying account perks, such as Marketplace access and more photo space on the forum. Users who have historically run into issues with PayPal donations may wish to consider the newsletter platform instead, as we have integrated it with a different payment processor.
The new platform is designed to comply with the latest privacy standards, so if you'd like to read it, please manually opt-in to the newsletter: forum members are not automatically subscribed to the e-mails. To get the best of Pentax Forums sent to you once a week in a convenient digest, enter your e-mail in the form above, or visit newsletter.pentaxforums.com.
And we want to know what will make this newsletter valuable to you! Please let us know what content you want to see in the comments.
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Christopher J Feola's unfinished autobiography is entitled Things I did While Planning to do Completely Different Things. He has accidentally or serendipitously been Banned from the Pacific Rim, taught at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism before receiving his B.S., and been granted four patents in data architecture, none of which made good use - any use, really - of his major in Theatre or his minor in Modern Dance. He serendipitously became a photojournalist when his first editor handed him a Pentax ME and said Reporters have to take pictures. He was the founding director of The Media Center at the American Press Institute, and taught at the graduate level at Columbia and Indiana universities, among others. Feola was named one of the 50 most influential people in new media by Online Journalism Review, appeared on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer on PBS and Talk of the Nation on NPR, been written up in Business 2.0 and The New York Times; and addressed a joint session of the World Newspaper Congress and the World Editors Forum in Kobe, Japan. He worked at seven papers in 18 states and five countries on a couple of continents, including a two-year stint covering Asia as a foreign correspondent for Pacific Stars & Stripes. He has more than 4,000 published articles and 6,000 published photos to his credit, and his photos on Google Maps have racked up 35 million views, which is in the top 100 worldwide. He is the founding partner of The PrivacyChain, where he is surprised by Web3 on a daily basis. 