[Zygonyx]

Interested to kow how many % Ricoh's patents are made into real products ...

[rawr]

how many % Ricoh's patents are made into real products

Probably only a fraction of them. I bet Ricoh on it's own has been granted hundreds of imaging patents over the years, and Ricoh now has (I think) ownership of Pentax's large patent portfolio too. So if every patent made it into a product, they'd have hundreds of products on the market at the moment.

Be interesting to know what sort of revenue Ricoh Imaging currently derives from licensing it's patents. I remember reading somewhere that for many years Pentax drew a very solid income from licensing it's SMC lens coating patents. Maybe Ricoh has one or two patent cash-cows too.

Patents can also be useful tactically, I think - to keep competitors at bay, serve as bargaining chips in some business negotiations, pad out the corporate valuation when needed etc.

[thibs]

Maybe they want to reinterate on whhat they did before:

GR digital -range with fixed lens
GX-range with zoom and EVF

Or GR derived with EVF. Something along those lines.

[DagT]

Interested to kow how many % Ricoh's patents are made into real products ...

Real products is only one reason for applying for a patent.
Sometimes that may do it to avoid a competing solution, annoying your competitors, other times for trading, getting access to solutions patented by others.

[Zygonyx]

I sincerely hope K-new will have made steady progress in continuous AF.

Trying to shoot flight-drinking swallows with K-3 and DFA-150-450 this week-end was just a nightmare ...

[gaweidert]

In some years, Kodak would receive as many as 200 patents. A lot of these were for new organic compounds. They had no use for them but someone may so they got patents for them. They spent some 10% of their gross sales on research.