Originally posted by cali92rs Ricoh said supposedly there was a worldwide 2,000 initial launch of the Z's, right? At B&H they are in stock, no waiting list, no back order.
In a day or 2, adorama will have them in stock, again, no back order.
So B&H and Adorama filled all their pre-orders and now their second shipment has arrived, which they ordered on spec. for inventory. Business as usual for the two largest US dealers. Who knows - maybe they have two each on hand.
I don't really know anything - but - I thought the
initial planned production was 2000 units through December, 2014. That doesn't mean production plans did not change in response to pre-orders. There were some rumors that Japanese institutional orders were larger than expected.
When it was said that 645Z pushed many other things to the side, what is inferred is that production plans changed to meet the surprising pre-production indications of interest. A FF camera without FF lenses is pointless. For my money, I'd bet the lens engineers were reassigned to updating the 645 lenses with IS and specifically for the 44x33 sensor (so no more D-FA645).
Furthermore, we have no idea how much profit a run of a 'small' number of 645Z creates, versus a run of
x number of a mythical FF in the same (limited capacity) production facility. A company like Pentax will do the most profitable thing possible at any given time.