Originally posted by jatrax I suppose in an ideal world you are right. But I don't think most buyers look at it that way. I certainly don't anyway. I just bought a car and looked at four different brands of SUV. I ended up with the most expensive, though not by a lot, because it had the features, color and looks I preferred. Come to think it was also actually bigger and heavier and got poorer gas mileage. If everyone just looked at the specifications and bought the cheapest thing that met their needs I suspect a lot of companies would be out of business.
Anyway time will tell. And I suspect the price of this lens will be sub $2k in about 12 months. Then it will be cheaper, bigger and heavier.
And if the IQ is in the ball park of the high end Canon and Nikon then it's all good.
People don't buy lenses for look and the one that does buy leica or Pentax ltd, not hugly fat teles
Of course some might like the bulkiness but I think people buy the dream of the ultimate performance, having the best and the actual ultimate performance.
We can see that people buy the dream when a review say it is not that good, people argue forever instead of accepting that this reviewer was not happy with the sample he got.
Anyway, Pentax need to establish the brand to be successfull so they need to get leverage on one or several point like ultimate AF performance, ultimate picture quality, smaller/ligher high quality gear, best price, marketing etc.
For sure the 70-200 can't compete on most account as Pentax is likely still a bit behind in AF despite the latest improvements. For sure the smaller/lighter is not here. That could be the best price after 1 year or so, we will see. Ultimate picture quality thing is still unknown, let's hope. Marketing... Not sure.
At worst Pentax must at least make good, competitives product even if not all will distinguish themselves.