Originally posted by monochrome How on Earth did this camera fail?
1. Price
I think the initial price was too high. This camera is definitely a great value at $600, but I am not too sure it was an $850 camera. It is an absolute steal at $250. I cannot believe they are still around at that price, that is bottom of the barrel point and shoot prices.
2. Reviews
But even at that I think that it failed because of the reviewers, and the consumer to a certain point. Pentax has been coming out with some very different designs recently, ignoring some of "common wisdom" being spouted by reviewers. The Q did not initially do well because the reviewers could not get past the fact that it used a small sensor, and had no EVF. The K-01 did not do well because it was too big, did not have an EVF, did not have a tilting display screen, and looked different. The K-01 and the Q are way beyond the sum of their parts. Their strengths do not lie in what you can do with other cameras. They can do those things but they do other things far better.
Now I am seeing similar reviews on the MX-1. It doesn't have an EVF nor a tilting screen.
3. Marketing
I don't think Pentax even realizes what they have sometimes. It is kind of like their marketing department doesn't even know how to tout the values of these cameras. Instead of attacking the reviews they seem to be willing to let these products live or die based on what some silly reviewers want to say.
If I had been marketing the K-01 I think the first ad would have been a two spread spot in all the photo mags showing the K-01 alongside two of their competitors, with each camera's lens line-ups shown behind the camera. The K-01 lens line up could have gone so far back into the picture that the lens faded away in the distance. Maybe show them sitting on one of those straight arrow highways in outback Australia. You could have shown the lenses for Pentax going so far back into the distance that it would have been silly. Maybe even make the pavement fade into lenses in the distance.
I think Pentax is coming out with some market take over ideas, but I don't the Ricoh marketing department are market killers.