Originally posted by biz-engineer It must be interesting (and maybe boring) to observe new product releases for someone who has seen camera and lens released over a significant chunk of camera history.
I still remember all the hype when the Spotmatic came out, and all the denial in Canon and Nikon camps. It taught me something, technical excellence has little to do with it. Brand loyalty is bigger mover of sales than technical innovation. Not one of my 20 classmates switched from Nikon or Canon to Pentax, even though it meant using hand held light meters with there DSLRs, and that the lens library was all Pentax. If you wanted to borrow a lens you needed a Pentax body. They preferred to just trudge along with their at the time antiquated gear.
Despite everyone going on about what Pentax has to do, think about the SPotmatic had a built in TTL light meter, meaning you didn't have to blow the equivalent of about $200 on one, and the use of free lenses for 3 years, and an incredibly streamlined exposure process, and people still didn't switch. Now people say "if only Pentax had "better AF" or whatever, People who haven't been around for a while underestimate how hard it is to move most camera users off their favourite brand.
Of course at that time half of us were already shooting Pentax, so it was really only 10 that preferred to stay in the dark ages.