[Albermarle]

My comment was aimed at those insisting that the KP was intended to be the new flagship.

The KP is the best crop camera Pentax are producing at the moment. Wouldn't that make it the current flagship crop camera for Pentax. If not I'm confused. And why is this concept so confronting for some. I guess sometime next year we will have another camera with higher specs than the KP that we all can agree is a flagship camera.

[rod_grant]

Wouldn't that make it the current flagship crop camera

No, K-3ii is the top (flagship) APS-C from Pentax. It may be discontinued in manufacture, but there will be plenty on the shelf still. The KP is a different kettle of fish altogether - I have one and am very happy with it, but I bought it knowing its pros and cons, and it is not, and never was, intended to carry the flag.

[Albermarle]

No, K-3ii is the top (flagship) APS-C from Pentax. It may be discontinued in manufacture, but there will be plenty on the shelf still. The KP is a different kettle of fish altogether - I have one and am very happy with it, but I bought it knowing its pros and cons, and it is not, and never was, intended to carry the flag.

Hmmm.....an interesting perspective.

[Chris Mak]

Perhaps they have enough stock to keep the K-3 II in stores until they launch the successor. Haven't seen any stores pull the K-3 II yet!

Looking forward to the interview Adam!
K3II is still widely available where I live, but stores are marking the K3II stock as "last stock".
I guess with the low sales at present, Ricoh can suffer it out for a while on the last of the K3II production. I don't think though it will allow for a gapless transition into the next APS-C top class model.
And it may not be essential. The next top class APS-C body is not very likely to be called K3III, is it? The K5 had its mkII, and was then replaced with the K3, which has had its mkII. Even without the Ricoh statement, we all know that there is the APS-C refresh cycle anyway, which was always going to bring us a new APS-C top model in early or mid 2019.

As the KP was modelled as a high end APS-C cpunterpart to the K1, they will likely fuse it with the K3 line specs into one going APS-C top model. Or did they also mention they were going to continue the KP line? Because thát last question was the real culprit. The K3 is, like the K5 series, history, but unless they fuse it with the KP into a new APS-C top model, the interesting question would be: will they also carry the KP line into the future? Otherwise, you might get a lot of KP owners populating this forum with complaints a few years from now.....
It seems an awful lot of models Pentax will have to carry, so they may have to make some difficult choices of how to exactly position the new APS-C top model, to not make it so expensive as to leave KP owners with no upgrade route.

Chris

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Last edited by Chris Mak; 03-05-2018 at 02:57 AM.

[beachgardener]

No, K-3ii is the top (flagship) APS-C from Pentax. It may be discontinued in manufacture, but there will be plenty on the shelf still. The KP is a different kettle of fish altogether - I have one and am very happy with it, but I bought it knowing its pros and cons, and it is not, and never was, intended to carry the flag.

absolutely, and the more i read about the KP the more I like and will probably invest in one even though my real need is in a flagship K-3II replacement type of camera.
I like the idea of having a small bag with KP and a few DA limited's, very appealing.

[JPT]

The K-7/5/3 series has been a kind of catch-all camera for enthusiasts until now. So the people who want a high speed camera for sports or birding have been directed to the K-3, and those who just want a high quality stills camera for their limited lenses have been directed there too. Both groups of customer were having certain compromises forced on them to accommodate the other. What interests me about the KP is that for every person who scorns it for not being a K-3, there’s another person who says it’s the best camera they’ve ever had. I think that’s the mark of a highly targeted product.

What I think is going on is that these are being split into two models. Eventually there will be a KP and a K?, with the latter looking more like a D500. So if I’m right, the KP is the successor to the K-3ii in a way, but just half of the successor.

I really think people are reading too much into the gaps between models. There was a time in 2012, when the K-5 had sold out about for a few months in Japan, and the only K-mount camera you could get was the K-r. Of course there was a K-5ii eventually. The K-3ii is at a similar stage to how the K-5 was at that time in terms of availability in Japan.

Ricoh has expanded the line-up of cameras by introducing models that don’t directly replace, but supplement current models (K-1 and KP). This is probably what is slowing down introduction of updates to established cameras like the K-3 and GR. I think it’s all going to make sense in a year or two.

I also think it’s quite possible that the Q has just been on hold and will be continued at some point. Retailers are still stocking the lenses, and I don’t think they would do that if the series was really done.

[Rondec]

Wow, what a discouraging discussion after what was (I think) a positive thread title and opening post!

It has always been clear to me the KP wasn't a K3 sequel. Yes, it could fill that position for folks who were satisfied with the compromises it brings to the table, but the whole point of the KP was to release a camera with "Pentax bones." A camera that matched up well with the small lenses (smaller than the K3 line), like the DA limiteds, had good ergonomics, and excellent image quality (including high iso performance). Based on Forum noise, you might think that such a camera would do well, but it turns out that Pentaxians are actually just as enamored with specifications as anyone else and so the KP was too limiting in terms of frame rate and buffer size and a few other things.

At the same time, the KP reveals Pentax's plan -- to try to target spots in the market where they aren't taking on Pentax/Sony/Nikon directly. So for this camera, taking a camera like the D7500 and adding two cards and Pentax features and ergonomics to it is probably the way they would go. The hard part is that this camera needs upgraded focus tracking and probably better video specs and those are things that take quite a bit of investment and time to develop. It'll be ready when it's ready isn't the sort of comment that makes anyone happy, but Pentax doesn't traditionally push products out of the door before they are truly completed and it is better for them to take the time they need to get a product right, both from a performance and marketplace targeting standpoint, than to release a half-baked camera that flops from the beginning or, has recalls to fix problems they should have known about.

I view all of these announcements as positive. It is good to see movement on the camera front, even if it is slower than we would like.

[Racer X 69]

The K5 had its mkII, and was then replaced with the K3, which has had its mkll.

Actually there were 3 in the K5 series.

K5, K5II, K5IIs.

So far there has been only 2 in the K3 series.

K3, and K3II.

[clackers]

On a birding day out, I ran into a cashed-up Nikon shooter who said he'd bought the KP and all the DA Limiteds because the system was beautiful.

[bxf]

why is this concept so confronting for some

Possibly because the KP, as good as it is, as a flagship it could be said to be severely lacking. One does not expect to have a new flagship in which features like shutter life, burst speed & buffer size, top LCD, number of SD card slots, and battery life are decreased in quality or eliminated altogether.

[photoptimist]

Allow me to answer.


Any successful company gets that way by responding to feedback from their customer. Noisy or otherwise. And most people prefer to complain rather than praise.


The customer is always right.


Ignore the customer, and kill your business.

But is that true?

There seem to be three problems with listening to the customer:

First, there is no "the customer" in photography. There's a spectrum of first-timers, photography-enthusiasts, gear-enthusiasts, brand-enthusiasts, status-symbol-enthusiasts, and pros. And then there's all the genres of photography: landscape, product, architecture, macro, wildlife (of various sizes, distances, and speeds), portrait, weddings, sports, drunken bicyclists, etc. All these different customers provide different feedback and demand different things. These demands sometimes conflict with each other and they always compete for R&D and manufacturing cost budget. Some customers are a lot harder to satisfy than others.

Second, the customer may simply be wrong. They may think a feature is really cool and really essential but not realize it comes with unintended negative consequences to performance, ergonomics, battery life, etc. Sometimes, even the noisy customer themselves would discover that they hate the camera they asked for.

Third, the volume of the voices of the complainers can be entirely divorced from the volume of sales even if the company does listen. One loud mouth is not the majority and talk is cheap. Even if the company does what the noisy customer demands, there is no guarantee that the noisy customer and others will buy. Haters gotta hate. That's especially true if the camera's price must increase to cover the R&D and manufacturing costs of the requested feature.

Sometimes listening to the customer can kill the business, too.


The challenge for the company, especially a smaller one like Pentax, is to decide which subset of customers to listen to and ignore the rest no matter how noisy they get.

[BigMackCam]

And then there's all the genres of photography: landscape, product, architecture, macro, wildlife (of various sizes, distances, and speeds), portrait, weddings, sports, drunken bicyclists, etc.

Excellent!!

[mohb]

The challenge for the company, especially a smaller one like Pentax, is to decide which subset of customers to listen to and ignore the rest no matter how noisy they get.

Given that Pentax video is somewhat lacking, according to those who do video, aren't Pentax following this advice?

My K3 will remain my flagship until one or the other of us gives up the ghost.

[Mark Ransom]

My comment was aimed at those insisting that the KP was intended to be the new flagship.

Of course the KP wasn't intended to be the new flagship. The K-1 was!

[BigMackCam]

Of course the KP wasn't intended to be the new flagship. The K-1 was!

This "flagship" term (and I use it myself) gets in the way sometimes... We're talking about a high end APS-C body - top of the APS-C range, with feature set to match