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09-28-2017, 09:09 AM   #1006
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QuoteOriginally posted by Rondec Quote
but probably just as important would be training people on the best settings for their camera and how to make the most of it.
A set of user settings for various uses, right on the dials would help here more than anything else.

After a few days out in the bush dealing with a non-electronic world, I come back not caring at all about Ricoh/Pentax's plans.

I got what i wanted with what I had. I feel kind of sorry for people who don't.

Besides, after buying my 100 macro, the House Appropriations Committee is refusing to approve any further capital expenditures. Even a replacement for the DFA 28-105 she seems to have permanently borrowed. I keep telling her it's my only kit for the K-1. She doesn't care.

09-28-2017, 09:17 AM   #1007
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QuoteOriginally posted by normhead Quote
A set of user settings for various uses, right on the dials would help here more than anything else..
I sure hope Pentax is reading this.


Pentax why are you so boring? Can you please give us something more interesting to talk about, we are struggling here. Screw this I'm going to look at photos.
09-28-2017, 09:27 AM   #1008
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QuoteOriginally posted by photoptimist Quote
Yes, "the public" (technically only that minuscule fraction of the public that might be interested in a stand-alone camera) must know Pentax exists. But to say that advertising is the only way anyone ever learns of the existence of a product seems quite wrong. ( Personally, I learned of Pentax and the K10D from a friend.) And to further assume advertising is a cost-effective way certainly compounds the potentially flawed logic. In an era of social media word of mouth, consumer skepticism of corporations, click-fraud, and ad blockers, I wonder if advertising is a huge waste of money but I readily admit that I don't know.

The drivers of sales is only half the equation. There's a big trade-off between the drivers of sales (e.g., the list of whiz bang features, performance levels, camera architectures du jour, and marketing) and the drivers of costs (e.g., R&D, manufacturing, purchased components, inventory, marketing, and services). We all have our personal opinions about what might drive sales the most although I'd expect Ricoh probably has better actual data on this based on their own sales figures and high-level contacts within the industry. What we lack is good estimates on the costs -- how much does it actually cost to design and manufacture a new lens, or a mirrorless camera with a suite of lenses, or world-class AF??? We don't know.

I don't think anyone is saying that advertising is the only way anyone ever learns of the existence of a product. But advertising is a crucial way to introduce and explain your products to the public. Advertising includes social media and is not apart from it today. Plus advertising can lead more word of mouth introductions too.


We don't have to know business costs as the consumer, that is up to the company to figure out. All we should ever have to care about is "Does your company offer a product lineup that meets our perceived needs and goals at the price we are willing to pay?" and nothing beyond this. It is up to the company to figure out what they are offering, why they are offering it, at which prices they are offering them, and to whom they are offering these products.


I do not have answers to those questions today with the current Pentax brand. They haven't explained it clearly enough..


That said, Did Kodak have the same inside information? Blackberry? Polaroid? Xerox? Yahoo? Blockbuster?


These companies failed to innovate and got lost in the undercurrent in a sea of change. But I bet they had all kinds of information saying "go the course", "competing products are just a fad", "things will be OK", "the market will stabilize", "don't be concerned" etc... no one wants to spend money and change an established platform into something new and not so established. Which tends to bite large companies in the keester if they are not willing to risk and innovate when they ultimately need to do so.


Information is only useful if it is accurate.
09-28-2017, 09:40 AM - 1 Like   #1009
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QuoteOriginally posted by mee Quote
I don't think anyone is saying that advertising is the only way anyone ever learns of the existence of a product. But advertising is a crucial way to introduce and explain your products to the public. Advertising includes social media and is not apart from it today. Plus advertising can lead more word of mouth introductions too.


We don't have to know business costs as the consumer, that is up to the company to figure out. All we should ever have to care about is "Does your company offer a product lineup that meets our perceived needs and goals at the price we are willing to pay?" and nothing beyond this. It is up to the company to figure out what they are offering, why they are offering it, at which prices they are offering them, and to whom they are offering these products.


I do not have answers to those questions today with the current Pentax brand. They haven't explained it clearly enough..


That said, Did Kodak have the same inside information? Blackberry? Polaroid? Xerox? Yahoo? Blockbuster?


These companies failed to innovate and got lost in the undercurrent in a sea of change. But I bet they had all kinds of information saying "go the course", "competing products are just a fad", "things will be OK", "the market will stabilize", "don't be concerned" etc... no one wants to spend money and change an established platform into something new and not so established. Which tends to bite large companies in the keester if they are not willing to risk and innovate when they ultimately need to do so.


Information is only useful if it is accurate.
“Marketing is about values. It’s a complicated and noisy world, and we’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. So we have to be really clear about what we want them to know about us.” – Steve Jobs

It's not rocket science even though this was set out by a genius of a marketing person. It's who you are, what you are doing and where you fit in. Silence, or the occasional faint squeak, isn't really the idea here. That said, I believe Ricoh are comfortable with Pentax staying small and relatively unknown because they see their primary mission to be servicing their traditional base of users - who already know all about them - rather than growing the business by attracting new ones. It's all about selling a legacy. The new stuff for another generation is for the Ricoh brand, at a guess. So, there is no great need to market the apparently forthcoming 85mm f1.4 lens, for example. Those who need to know already know, although probably there aren't that many of them. Personally I think Ricoh have been a little dull and have badly underestimated the potential appeal of the K1 camera their Pentax engineers produced for them - with a bit of marketing, it could have been positioned as the finest landscape camera ever made rather than as "the Pentax Full Frame" - but that's a different story.


Last edited by mecrox; 09-28-2017 at 09:49 AM.
09-28-2017, 10:10 AM   #1010
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QuoteOriginally posted by mecrox Quote
“Marketing is about values. It’s a complicated and noisy world, and we’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. So we have to be really clear about what we want them to know about us.” – Steve Jobs

It's not rocket science even though this was set out by a genius of a marketing person. It's who you are, what you are doing and where you fit in. Silence, or the occasional faint squeak, isn't really the idea here. That said, I believe Ricoh are comfortable with Pentax staying small and relatively unknown because they see their primary mission to be servicing their traditional base of users - who already know all about them - rather than growing the business by attracting new ones. It's all about selling a legacy. The new stuff for another generation is for the Ricoh brand, at a guess. So, there is no great need to market the apparently forthcoming 85mm f1.4 lens, for example. Those who need to know already know, although probably there aren't that many of them. Personally I think Ricoh have been a little dull and have badly underestimated the potential appeal of the K1 camera their Pentax engineers produced for them - with a bit of marketing, it could have been positioned as the finest landscape camera ever made rather than as "the Pentax Full Frame" - but that's a different story.
The world is relatively short of Steve Jobs types. There is no one at Pentax who can build a cult following from his persona. As an Apple person, I could trust Jobs to do what he did. As a company where the head of the company isn't involved in marketing products, you can't have a Steve Jobs. he was the boss and what he said went.... if someone like that were head of Pentax/Ricoh, we wouldn't be having this conversation.INstead we here of a split marketing engineering department obviously sometimes at odds with no ultimate refereee looking at the choices and then representing the company at marketing events. I distinctly remembering Pentax saying the FF would be out when marketing approved. Steve Jobs didn't need anyone's approval. people had to get his.

He selected things based on his own personal ideas of "cool" and anyone who shared his vision had a champion. Apart from the lens design guy, who is actually quite impressive, there is no face to either Pentax or Ricoh, and it' clear reading the lens design guy, even if he thinks it's "cool" he may not be able to bring it to market. Apple was a corporation with a face. These camera companies are faceless.

I haven't bought an Apple product in years, but I know who Tim Cook is.

Last edited by normhead; 09-29-2017 at 07:01 PM.
09-29-2017, 01:32 PM   #1011
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Bump, LOL!
09-30-2017, 09:10 AM   #1012
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yep we know who steve jobs is and we know loads of people worship the brand for what steve made of it. but that will be over at the very moment some company offers similar touch devices with the same independent and "sealed up" software eco-system accorded by desktop workstations and laptop that nearly feel the same.

And i dont have any idea, why everybody thinks, that every company that wants to have success and show its unique products, should have a figurehead like steve jobs.

Sometimes i have what one would call "empathic" feelings, and if I am in that mood and see just one "Steve Jobs"-Imitator, I have deep feelings of second hand emberassment.
Such attempts always went wrong.

Be it Samsung presenting a new flagship. - lame performance
Be it Ricoh presenting the new Theta...(laptop too slow... *facepalm* - too heavy japanese accent ... this guy was so hard to understand)

!!or APPLE itself... --> FACE DETECTION fail ... ROFL...


But since we are talking I think, Pentax could need more people like "Allen Birnbach" to promote them...
(so we are talking about professional photographers that make a living and more of photography)
real good ambassadors that really work with the stuff and show with what they are working....

Candidates could be:
Trey Ratcliff
Dave Hill
Alexey Titarenko
Daniel Sannwald

..hm... or todays Herb Ritts(R.I.P.)... Craig McDean for instance...

but if RICOH Imaging really would want a real figurehead, they maybe should choose Mario Testino... Thats as close as can get to a Steve Jobs in Photography.
(he is nearly as old as steve would be now... maybe a year up or down i fancy-- but he is just a photographer and no engineer. Question is does RICOH-Imaging need an engineer to promote a good camera or a photographer ?)
nonetheless, ...

...I am certain camera companies should rather offer more service (and presence)and better (more elaborated)products to gain more customers then search for the next steve jobs.
We all know what would have to get better in PENTAX cameras, so I spare us the part where i mention that specific point, for which many long loyal customers already jumped ship.

09-30-2017, 09:42 AM   #1013
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Looking Forward the 85 1.4 with PLM

AF 8.3 times faster than its screw-drive FA counterpart?
09-30-2017, 09:47 AM - 1 Like   #1014
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QuoteOriginally posted by camyum Quote
But since we are talking I think, Pentax could need more people like "Allen Birnbach" to promote them...(so we are talking about professional photographers that make a living and more of photography)real good ambassadors that really work with the stuff and show with what they are working....

I agree. The photographers listed as Pentax ambassadors on the website all do wonderful work but if you check their websites only 1 has a blog and that is very infrequently updated. None of them promote the Pentax brand that I can see and none offer tips, tutorials or other educational materials working with their Pentax. I don't think you can underestimate what pros like Steve Perry on the landscape side, or Joe McNally on flash do for the Nikon brand -- and I don't think those guys are even paid spokesman, but even if they are Pentax could definitely use people of that caliber working with the brand, promoting It, and showing how to use it best.
09-30-2017, 10:25 AM   #1015
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QuoteOriginally posted by camyum Quote
And i dont have any idea, why everybody thinks, that every company that wants to have success and show its unique products, should have a figurehead like steve jobs.
I know, they all want to be in second place or way down the list somewhere.

Success isn't important to everyone.

When I think Canon I think Andre Agassi or Maria Sharapova. We aren't talking about what i would buy,. The vast majority of purchasers of any kind of product are "me too-ers." The appeal of Steve Jobs was he was both a celebrity and CEO, and that's hard to match.

For the "me too-ers" someone to identify with is important. Again, I'm not talking personal preference, I'm talking about what you have to do to reach the top. Looking at Canon and Nikon sales I'm guess the "I'm with that guy over there." crowd are 50% of the market.

They don't care what the product is or how it stacks up against the competition, they care about who else uses it.

Last edited by normhead; 09-30-2017 at 10:31 AM.
09-30-2017, 11:58 AM   #1016
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QuoteOriginally posted by normhead Quote
The world is relatively short of Steve Jobs types.
...
I haven't bought an Apple product in years, but I know who Tim Cook is.
Do you know Elon ?
Because imho, he could be valued ^10 of any of the Jobs-Zuckerberg-Cook-and-who-else we did see.
09-30-2017, 05:18 PM   #1017
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Nobody wants to talk about the 85 anymore?
09-30-2017, 07:14 PM   #1018
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QuoteOriginally posted by dcpropilot Quote
Nobody wants to talk about the 85 anymore?
What's to talk about? The few guys that post here that have any information haven't shared anything in months. There's been nothing shared from Ricoh in just as long. I think there's a lot of folks feeling kind of fed up or frustrated with the lens situation in k-mount land between slow output from Papa Pentax and the 3rd party vendors slinking away from k-mount for the last few years.

I don't know why Sigma doesn't drop a thousand 85 Art's in k-mount as a staged 'accident' to see how much of this market they can steal ahead of the Pentax 85. Same with their 20 Art.
09-30-2017, 07:36 PM   #1019
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QuoteOriginally posted by pres589 Quote
What's to talk about? The few guys that post here that have any information haven't shared anything in months. There's been nothing shared from Ricoh in just as long. I think there's a lot of folks feeling kind of fed up or frustrated with the lens situation in k-mount land between slow output from Papa Pentax and the 3rd party vendors slinking away from k-mount for the last few years.

I don't know why Sigma doesn't drop a thousand 85 Art's in k-mount as a staged 'accident' to see how much of this market they can steal ahead of the Pentax 85. Same with their 20 Art.
kenspo has posted at least a dozen times in September, most of them in this thread Asahi man has been absent since June 30

I think we chase away everyone who tries to come here and tell us (as much as they can about) what's happening. We're so negative.

The 50 and 30 are coming soon enough, and the 85. And the K-3n.
09-30-2017, 07:50 PM   #1020
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I appreciate kenspo and Asahi Man both posting here. kenspo hasn't shared anything of real weight, on this particular subject, in quite a while. I don't want anyone to get in trouble with Ricoh for over-sharing.

The tone could probably be more positive. I look forward to more products that people really enjoy using and get good results with.
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