Originally posted by asw66 Leaks are normally a bad thing, since they deter buyers from making a purchase right now. But perhaps Ricoh is gambling that it's better to deter a few present-day Pentaxians from upgrades right now rather than switching to different systems. In my case, I'm ridiculously loyal, but the Sony A7 II has given me pause.
Sony A7 is really nice if you look at the glass half full. Support for many lenses from other system manually, quite compact/light and affordable body... You get FF support for all your creativity needs.
If one want to look at the glass half empty, the smaller body comes with shorter registration distance meaning the lenses are bigger or comparable to existing FF lenses. Sony did find a walkaround providing slower lenses in FE mount to keep them reasonably small. You keep say a real MTF adventage if you go A7r (and that useless in most cases) but the high iso and deph of field control thing is almost lost (not entirely as lenses perform better a smaller apperture anyway). What finally stay would be possibility for smaller wide angle primes.
Many wonder what Pentax should do with K-mount regarding mirrorless and shorter registration distance. For the long term, to me, that look quite easy. K-mount is kept for FF bodies and I see no issues at least for the 10 coming years.
Theses FF can be as small/light asA7 just with a bit more deph to accomodate K-mount and come with an EVF. A bigger version could have EVF, OVF or something hybrid. No real reason to change the mount for size here. I do not say even that upcoming FF need to be that small/light already, but that for the long term vision, I would say.
APSC version of this could be kept or when FF sensor become cheap, all the old APSC lenses would work nativelly on the FF... just with more limitations.
The smaller sensor body could be exactly the same as the FF body and just a bit bigger/heavier than A7. But for this sensor size, there more reason to change mount and Pentax can provide something smaller/lighter with a registration distance that match the sensor format. This is not the case of APSC with K-mount and this make wide angle bigger than really needed. Such "poketable" camera would be best up to say 135mm FF focal lens or even up to 200-300 with small apperture consumer zooms. But to keep it reasonably small, you'd better avoid anything longer than 100mm or have it with small apperture.
The FF body would accomodate ultimate quality and all kind of lenses of any size/apperture.
So I see finally 3 camera models in the long term: a smaller format (maybe APSC) with new mount, an FF with K-mount and an APSC with K-mount.