The story told on the forum..... the Fuji 645 was going to seriously hurt 645z sales.
The truth.
Quote: DE: Interesting. It’s also interesting that you said that there was this kind of a momentary, short-term effect, that you saw some sales drop, but then it was limited time. And so sales for 645Z are continuing strong for you?
TA: Yes, yes.
I wonder if those Fuji people will now adjust their imaginary world view to closer reflect reality.
If you want to extrapolate., mirrorless doesn't affect SLR sales. Both can work along side each other. It would appear to be a different market, once the initial purchases by people who didn't have a mirrorless option before now and suddenly had one bought into Fuji, but once those sales were gone, it didn't affect Pentax at all. Pentax sales rebounded to previous levels.
Funny, in all the previous chatter I don't remember anyone suggesting that as a possibility. A little bit of actual evidence goes a long way towards the accuracy of these kinds of predictions.
My guess is the reason for the decline in dedicated camera sales has more to do with the improvements in smart phones than mirrorless, and that is affecting all dedicated cameras pretty much equally. I went to my niece's wedding a few weekends ago, I shot with my K-1, but I was quite impressed with the images people got with their phones, even in really bad light. I can even imagine a time when, I buy something like an iPhone 10 with my camera account. Fuji and companies like them are buying into a rapidly shrinking market. At this point changing market conditions have to be impacting their projected initial market analysis. My guess is the new comers are in a lot more trouble than Pentax is. And Pentax doesn't appear to be in any trouble at all, despite all the doom and gloom of some on the forum. Pentax appears to be thriving.
They continue to excel at things, no one else even thought of, and beat their own expectations in sales projections.