Originally posted by detour Thank you for your information. Well, I didn't mean to get the code or something. I engaged in this thread just because pentexians in China react rather rashly to this update. And as one of them I'd like to bring more information to the group chat.
No problem. I was just not sure what I could point to as the source. Anyway, it seems like Pentatians everywhere have not been impressed with this idea, and that's true in Japan too.
Originally posted by UlrichSchiegg I wrote "could". Could also be the OS. Could also be the impact of the touch screen. Could be that the new processors allow larger i.e. better raw to jpg software processing, ...
Regarding this whole discussion, the firmware of the GR III and K-3 III are clearly a different generation to the previous cameras. They have a different look and feel, support for touchscreens, better wi-fi and seem to be based on some variant of Linux, while the prior ones were not specified. Anyway, newer software is nearly always designed on the assumption that more memory/storage is available.
There was a Japanese magazine interview last year where HIraku Kawauchi of Ricoh Imaging (Marketing/Pentax) talked about the new firmware being a "once in a decade" improvement. In fact, adding all the DSLR-specific parts to the existing GR III interface was a much bigger task than they anticipated and it was one of the reasons the camera didn't come out in 2020.
I have a theory about the master plan behind this new firmware base. I think it will be much easier to share software improvements between cameras when they are on the new firmware. For example, imagine that Ricoh makes a monochrome GR III sometime later this year. This has been rumored vaguely a number of times, and I tend to find it quite believable given the preferences of the GR market. They will have to develop the B/W image processing for it. Having done that, it would be relatively easy to port it over to any other future camera on the same firmware, such as a K-3 III, to make a special edition. Sound familiar? A crowdfunded monochrome K-3 III was one of the models they asked about in a survey earlier this year. The survey gave some details, including a proposed release date of 2023 (while the Astro K-70 option was sooner, in 2022). So my guess is a monochrome GR is coming - not through crowdfunding or anything like that - they're just going to make it as an additional model. This is the camera that will enable them to make K-3 III relatively easily, but not until 2023. Time will tell if this actually happens, and it's just my hypothesis.