Originally posted by discharged You have taken quite a beating these last few days, glad to see you're not knocked out cold yet!
Perhaps I can add some validity to Kenspo...I am a former Ricoh employee and since about three months back I've recieved a steady stream of rumors from my former coworkers. Let me give you the full story on how it began and I will let you decide if you believe me or not. It is mentioned on my facebook page that I atleast used to be employed by ricoh.
www.facebook.com/discharged and if you look at my activity you can see that nothing has changed for many months, if not years... I don't use facebook
I became a father about 7 months ago, and when my son was ~4 months old I took him out on a meet and greet, to Ricoh and to my current employer. I had my camera with me ofcourse and when they saw it was an k-30 they told me that I should upgrade that old brick. I then said that I wanted to, but I felt that for my shooting I wanted to go for a full frame camera and I had been testing the Sony A7 but did not like the viewfinder, and I have so many k-mount lenses that I still want to use. I got a cryptic response from one in the camera division saying losely translated into english "why not buy a pentax full frame? Oh, we don't have any of those... Sorry don't know what I thought about... we must be in the future marty! "*big smile and a wink* or not wink but like throwing the head, like a model or actor if you understand... My name is Martin and the last sentance was actually said in english, a reference to back to the future
This was all in the *I don't know the right word but where you sit and drink coffee etc. during breaks in an office*
After that when I was back at my old room, I prodded one I used to work with a bit, but he had no idea of anything to do with cameras, he is not interrested and he works with IT so I was not surprised.
Then the next day I got a text saying "one year or less
"
Since then I've gotten a few tidbits when we have had lunch etc. Nothing really concrete, some office gossip, some fractions of tangible information. The persons I know the best at Ricoh work like myself in IT and not with the cameras, so mostly gossip they have picked up themselves.
As someone who works for a multinational software company, who also works in development, who also works at HQ, who also works in the development group that makes the most "stuff"....I can verify that most of the company will not know what is going on until things are pretty much complete.
We are usually working generations ahead in development, and when the public gets our stuff, we've usually been working on those generations ahead for some time.
Organizations like support and sales take time to ramp-up, and that takes anywhere from 6 months - 2 years. In that time, we have "quiet periods" where we can say nothing.
If we *did* say something, it would be an easy thing to find out "who said what" since not that many people have the critical info.
So what does that mean?
It means that enough time has passed in the Ricoh pipeline, to deliver a FF Pentax, and it will be announced when all the ducks are in a row, and is honestly, old news in the Ricoh back-channels.