Originally posted by TwoUptons It would be funny (in an extremely un-funny way) if delays on all the other Pentax lenses were due to success selling Tokina versions of Pentax lenses... though I doubt that’s the case...
-Eric
Why would it be? Successfully selling means producing more. Not so much more in absolute terms though since we are talking about a $950 50mm lens, not a $250 walk-around lens.
Delays or rather a slow development pace come from low R&D funding, which has nothing to do with supposed production bottlenecks. On the contrary, the more money Smart Vision make from their partnership with Tokina (whatever its content), the more funding available for R&D and the quicker the development pace.
Going one step further, one could suppose that an ambitious lens like the HD Pentax-D FA★ 50mm f/1.4 SDM AW wouldn't have been developed at all in the absence of the incremental return on investment provided by the Tokina version.