Originally posted by Kameraten With the great lens line-up (considering all K-lenses) and the good layouts of menus and screens I still think it's a pity Pentax will not advance into the mirrorless sector. That is just about the only one with growth potential. The reasons are many. Among them the decline of car travel, which makes it essential to shrink your luggage and also your photo equipment.
Another is the vast selection of lenses available with adapters when you go to thinner bodies. Point in case: I own both of the bodies below, they produce images of roughly the same quality, but the one on the left takes only Pentax lenses and is hard and slow to use in manual focus, the one on the right takes every Pentax, Konica, Minolta and Konika-Minolta lens I own and it's a breeze to focus manually. Weight and bulk difference almost 2:1.
The only situations that keep me using the K-1 II from time to time is outdoor daylight photography, where the Sony EVF is not bright enough, or when AF is essential (I happen not to have any Sony FE-lenses yet).
Pentax might consider what the buyers value in future cameras. What the producers value is, frankly, less interesting.
It's pretty much a given that Canon, Nikon and Sony will be 100% mirrorless in a few years. That gives a small player like Pentax good growth potential by catering to the people who want to use optical viewfinder cameras.
Sixty years ago, Leica should have given up on rangefinders and moved to SLR cameras like everyone else.
They didn't, they stayed with what they did best.
Their few attempts to make an SLR failed miserably. At that time, it was Pentax, Nikon and Canon that had a stranglehold on the SLR camera market and Leica couldn't break in.
However, staying with rangefinders was a good decision, as people who wanted one had very limited choices.
Mirrorless may have growth potential, but that market is sewn up, the same way the SLR market was sewn up on the 1960s. Where are the bit players from that era now?
There is no future in being a bit player in mirrorless.