Originally posted by Jeff Lopez Actually what Ron and surfar say could be a glimpse of the future for Pentax..For what I seen, Chinese,Malaysians and Phillipines are raving and spending a lot more on cameras, much more than Japanese right now and prefer alternative brands other than the 3 major Japanese cameras brands.
The Yi M1 is a very nice camera produced with the young and incoming crop of photogs in mind, and Pentax should be riding on that wave. I wouldnt be suprised that the next Pentax dslr contain Asian (not Japanese(Sony) sensors and related electronics.
I live in a tourist town which gets many hundreds of thousands of visitors a year. The surrounding area gets even more. Many, perhaps even the majority, are from the Far East. When these visitors, often tour groups, have money they
really have money like it is going out of style. I've got quite used to seeing, say, a Canon 5D Mark III or Mark IV plus an L series lens round the neck of someone who really doesn't look all that interested in photography. What they are interested in, perhaps, is a quality product from a solid brand name and they can easily afford whatever it takes. My best score so far is two couples from Japan touring the town together, with each of the men wearing two Leicas in leather half-cases.
What we get up to in the West is increasingly not where it's happening. I would guess that Canon's relatively good performance over the past few years is down in large part to their building a powerhouse of a sales and marketing machine in Asia. Among the Asian visitors here, Canon beat Nikon by a large margin. That's why the Chinese government admonishing Nikon over the D600 fiasco was so disastrous for the company. It would have been like a European company being black-marked and run out of town in North America in the 70s or 80s. Goodbye your best and biggest new market.
The young, OTOH, are mainly for smartphones. The cameras tend to be for the older folks. But then they are the ones with the money.
I'd be very wary of writing off the new Chinese companies like Yi. They may get it wrong, of course, but they are plugging into a huge and wealthy system we just don't understand over here.