[Kunzite]

Wow, I'm speechless!
A quick glance over Ricoh Forum - I see optimism, people are very positive. I expect that to change, though - as we'll start registering there
Should we bet, how much 'till the first "Ricoh is dying" thread? Or "Ricoh, where is my FF", or "Ricoh, where is my mirrorless" and the list goes on, and on, and on, and on...

[adamfogerty]

Because that'd make zero sense.
Show me how many people know the "Ricoh" camera brand....ask any people on the street.
I remember a great little film P&S they made way back, but that's about it...

That was my point about acquiring the Pentax brand - maybe they just want to leverage that to further their own products. Slap the more well known (arguably, in consumer circles at least) Pentax name on things and instant brand recognition.

Unlikely yes, but not impossible - just today it was annouced that Nortel's patent portfolio has been sold for $4.5bn.

[Jeff Bennett]

$124 million? Any idea what Pentax's annual sells numbers are? Seems like that could be a good buy. The products are good. Marketing as we all know is the problem. I wish an american company would have stepped in and bought them. (No offense to all my European and Asian friends.) How about Pentax made right here. I'd pay 10-20% more. Somebody like a Kodak with a history in photography would make sense. A product as god as any that only has 2% of it's market sure is a helluva lot of room for growth.

[uccemebug]

I suppose the big gorilla in the room is what is Ricoh's relation to Sony?

I haven't seen any follow up on this comment in a couple of pages of this forum. Lauren, can you elaborate?

[bobell69]

Hoya made some good moves including moving back to using a Sony sensor, following up on the K7 with the K5, finally getting the 645D Medium Camera out the door to rave reviews.

Where Hoya failed is in marketing and promotion, production of a sufficient number of lens variants to keep the existing market and future market interested and engaged, and no Full Frame.

I'm just hoping that Ricoh will move on those areas quickly to re-establish Pentax as a significant competitor. From the initial documentation out there today it appears that they have a desire to do so.

We know that the technology is right at the tipping point for success, it is just a matter of someone with vision and deep pockets to make the product succeed.

[stormcloud]

well after hearing that ricoh has at very least potentially deeper pockets than hoya and that they actually WANT the part of pentax that we are interested in then i'm going to be optomistic about this and hope for shiney new super telephoto lenses and better autofocus - dont give a damn about full frame though its just loosing some effective focal length

[raider]

I am thrilled by the news. While I see that some forumers feel that ricoh may not be the right company to buy pentax, I feel that they are going to the right people especially considering that ricoh is more than 10 times bigger than Hoya and ricoh bought pentax for its digital imaging and security surveillance stuff. The sales motivation seems more logical than hoya's purchase of pentax in the first place when all they want is the medical imaging component.

There are not many companies that do cameras that are in the position to acquire pentax, no? If we are unhappy for ricoh to acquire pentax, who do we really want to acquire pentax then? Surely not Sony canon nikon Olympus I don't think? If they did I think the k-mount will be dead. So look on the bright side. K-mount will survive.

Looking at the press release ricoh said they will retain the pentax brand for some of it's products and I guess this is the Dslr side of things. Is this not a good thing for us?

[creampuff]

I've been so busy that I missed this news completely.
But on reflection, I honestly believe this is a positive move for both Hoya and Ricoh. Hoya was the white knight who came at the right time to bump off the ultra-conservative and frankly clueless old Pentax management and saved the company financially. For this I am grateful to them. Their innovative approach helped them roll out new models that brought Pentax back on track, regaining new users and stopping the declining market share. But in the larger scheme of things, Hoya with its long history as a maker of optical glass nevertheless never had a tradition of making cameras nor was involved in photo imaging per se. Now that they have rejuvenated the Pentax brand, it makes financial sense to reap a financial gain by selling it to a company with a proven history in imaging, which Ricoh definitely has.

For Ricoh, the acquisition of Pentax is definitely a boost for them. For one, they would gain the bigger brand recognition that they have never managed to have all this years. It also makes sense to retain the Pentax name sp as to not kill the golden goose now that the Pentax user base has grown over the last few years. The challenge for Ricoh is to channel their energies that have allowed them to come up with unique (so would say quirky) line-up of cameras to become a full fledged mainstream brand that will occupy the mind share of the camera buying public. Overnight they've become a DSLR player and their experience in compact cameras will no doubt filter into future Pentax compact cameras. So I see this news as positive. On a personal note, my first camera was a Ricoh 500GX rangefinder and I still have fond memories of the fine images I had from that 40mm Rikenon lens. The other good thing is my sis-in-law currently works in Ricoh...

[m8o]

One unprofitable company buys other unprofitable company to be profitable...
Interesting movie...

We'll I'll go out on a limb and say you must not be a millionaire. And you're not doing yourself any favors holding to that wisdom.
I work for a company -- and survivor that started and fought through the internet era -- that went from being deeply un-profitable, to making un-leveraged buy-outs of other un-profitable entities until it became flat to slightly profitable. The execs then had the wherewithal [& balls] of using the incredibly cheap money available our there to making leveraged buyouts of first purchasing an un-profitable entity 3x our size, then a few years later another leveraged-buyout of an un-profitable entity that was our 2nd largest competitor now our new 4x combined size; making for an entity 8x larger than the original. ... Our company increased our revenues 15x within a few short years while through benefits from synergies and removing redundancies greatly expanding margins, by [to recap] combining several un-profitable entities. We're on-track to be paying off the few hundred million dollars of extremely cheap debt within just a few years and becoming a monster cash cow (but I don't doubt there will be another leveraged purchase before that time).

So, you just laugh at the thought of it. Me, I've backed management and it's payed off several-fold.

[uccemebug]

They are now.

+1

It's obviously saner for Pentax to be owned by a company who wants to develop a photo branch, than a company who wants to sell one...

Too right. I'm glad I'm not the only one seeing this in a positive light. A K GXR module would be the sort of no-brainer. It's the #2 mount choice at Ricoh Forums, BTW.

(@Adam
can you contact the admins over there about sharing logins so we don't have to cross-post and make accounts all over the place? I happen to know that MyBB is easy peasy on the user management side....)

[kadajawi]

2011/07/02 05:06 - Ricoh Sees Pentax Buy As Springboard Into Consumer Market
"Ricoh hopes to grow its camera operations by integrating the sales channels that Pentax has built up over the years primarily in the U.S. and Europe with its own"
lol. That cracked me up. Sales channels in the US?

Not sure if this is good news... probably it is. Ricoh wants to get into the DSLR business it seems, so they have no intent to kill the DSLR line of Pentax. That's good. And perhaps they can invest a bit in marketing Pentax... honestly I can't understand what Hoya was thinking or doing. Doing good ads for the Pentax DSLRs seems to be pretty easy to me, it's like selling a product that basically sells itself. Even Sigma has TV ads now... (they aren't great, but there's not much Sigma can do I guess), on the other hand Pentax could focus on their tradition (in the 70s a man takes photos of his new born baby. He puts his Pentax SLR back into a cabinet, then we see that very baby as a young man/woman taking the lens from that camera and mounting it on his new Pentax DSLR to take photos of his newborn...).

[PentaxRev]

I read most of the posts so far and think most of them capture at least some measure of truth.

First, we Pentaxians don't know at this point whether this will be a good or bad thing for us.

Second, if I were buying a new DSLR for the 1st time would it be Pentax right now? No. The future is just too uncertain.

Third, Do I plan on selling off my bag full of equipment right now? No, the future isn't that uncertain.

It's hard for me to imagine that Ricoh bought Pentax to gut it. The Pentax name is much stronger than the Ricoh name and Pentax DLSR's hold their own in the current market.

The announcement suggests they are going to expand the interchangable line. That sounds at positive at least potentially. They are a much larger company than Hoya which suggests they have the potential of spending a lot more on research and development. Considering how well Pentax has done with their cameras in the last couple of years with their small R & D department, we could see Pentax become a much bigger player in the camera market.

The verdict is just still out. I love Pentax system and certainly don't want to have to start building my kit all over again. However, if Pentax disappears I will switch companies, I just hope that doesn't happen! Nothing but time will tell so the speculation we're doing now is just that... speculation.

[dj_saunter]

This is a disaster. Quick everyone, sell me your FA limited lenses at a 50% discount since the future is unclear.

[TZH]

All current products will continue to be sold with the PENTAX brand name under current operations.

Just current products....?

[Fontan]

I think that this is the beginning of the end. Reminds me of minolta.