Originally posted by derelict What does that mean? Are you trying to say that people shooting Sony (growing daily), Olympus/ Panasonic (like Len Metcalf), and Fuji (growing daily) are not real photographers? Not too mention that Nikon is about to release a FF mirrorless. Holy crap, you are hilarious!
I get brand allegiance and all that but statements like that are just blind fandom. The truth is that Pentax would probably LOVE to have at least an APS-C mirrorless on the market but they simply do not have the money. I think that the KP should have been delayed just a little longer and been designed around one of Sonys mirrorless sensors.
Pentax is K-mount and 645 mount. Q mount is dormant.
The K- mount itself si not suitable for mirrorless camera and lens designs. It is too deep (45.48 mm) to make the camera thinner and shorter focal length lenses smaller, which was the original marketing “benefit” of mirrorless designs. KP is a design study to show that with DA Limited lenses a DSLR can be thin and small while still producing superb images.
To make a propier MILC Pentax must design a completely new mount, which would be the fourth mount in their catalog, as well as develop a completely new image processing engine to allow competitive video. Pentax has a core corporate value statement promising backward compatibility for every Pentax lens ever manufactured to be operable on every new Pentax camera in each mount. In order to honor this promise any new mirrorless mount would also need an operating converter with mechanical aperture linkage control and a mechanism to allow an in-body or in-converter focus motor to drive existing legacy lenses. Pentax also believes the optical viewfinder is the proper way to frame a scene - agree with them or not, that is their culture and corporate know-how. They have zero corporate know-how in EVF’s and not enough in video.
Pentax would not LOVE to have an APSc MILC on the market. That does not make business sense.