Originally posted by Snappertim In house design software is only one consideration for a green light to manufacture, the marketing and finance departments of Ricoh will have their say on the matter, why design and "tool up" production yourself when others will make a "off the shelf" conversion to your specifications and then if all fails the "in costs" will have been lower to get into the market segment you want, if the projected "market penertration" is successful replace the bought in components with your own, Pentax has "outsourced" many parts of its product catalogue for decades, the fash system was Panasonic, after k10 it went to Nissin, that's why the flash protocol changed, so Nissin had a chance to sell guns along side the new k20 k7 Ect, the 31/43/77 used to be made by Cosina/Voightlander, Tamron have supplied several zoom lens, and my bet is the 150-450 is a Sigma, long time cooperator with Ricoh since the Sigma SA1 (A Ricoh KR10 rebadged and supplied with a Sigma 28-70 zoom, and the KR10 was a Nikkormat with a k mount and more electronics), Seikorex make the shutters, ME range was the first (Sekonic light and flash meters, Seiko watches any electronic timing device) Sanyo make the rechargeable bits batteries and chargers, Tokina made the 16-50 and 50-135 and will supply the new standard zoom 24-70 and a new wideangle zoom, the new 70-200 maybe Tamron or Tokina, 645z is in house but the lens are now made by Tamron who owned and made the medium format Bronica range, Q series was originally a Kenko product. sorry to upset you guys who think Pentax is a large manufacturing giant, sorry its not, its been a bit of a "Paper Operation" for some time.
Thanks for this other enlightment.
I think we - the "western" people - don't have the same cultural schemes as the "eastern" people, amongst whom Japanese are also a special case.
So, interpreting some reactions here, against facts billiantly illustrated as you did ; the past and actual "photog ecosystem" in Japan doesn't match with the "competition paradigm" that too many of us see as an intangible and constant goal in (economical) life.
Moreover, you confirm that there are sound economical arguments in favor of more and more "cross-cooperation" as far as optics design and manufacture happens to be - see
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Last edited by Zygonyx; 08-13-2015 at 09:34 AM.