Originally posted by UncleVanya I tend to agree but they wouldn’t gain two things that mirrorless designs normally give: short flange focal distance (reduces length, removes retro focal need on wide angles) and an incentive to customers to buy all new lenses. This last one benefits companies not consumers. I think a dslr flange distance mirrorless design would have weak appeal but perhaps if ff it would appeal to a certain set of manual focus lens users and lightweight minimalist ff users.
This being the problem. Pentax would have needed to introduce a new line of lenses designed for short registration. The money wasn't there.
Pentax started bleeding money in the late 1980s and never stopped it. They were late to every party from the start of marketable AF onwards and ended up being the camera industry's wallflower.
The MZ-D, had they gone ahead with it, would have killed them the same way Kyocera died on Dalsa Hill. Had it worked, we might still have a Pentax Corp rather than a Pentax division. It was a Hail Mary that was short of the intended receiver.
Water under the bridge.
The myriad problems with the K5 signaled to me what Hoya was doing. They didn't want the camera division and so set about to make it look profitable on paper to make it acceptable to a buyer, and they sold the division to Ricoh for what can only be described as a fire sale price.
Heck, we could probably have pooled our resources here and come up with the funds needed to buy Pentax from Hoya.
The point being, Pentax has not had major R&D funding for decades. A short registration mirrorless system has never been on the table.