Originally posted by Wheatfield You ignore my facts, I ignore your facts.
The fact is, Hoya has, apparently, decided that it wants to make a certain amount of money from the Pentax brand. How they do it is their business, whether or not this seems fair.
Some of it is bound to be economy of scale, some of it is bound to be the cost of restructuring Pentax itself, some of it is probably trying to cover the cost of R&D on upcoming products (perhaps we are paying for 645D development as we speak, so to speak), and if some of it is plain and simple gouging, well, perhaps Hoya just doesn't like Europeans very much. Who knows.
facts are not ours to own, they just are. i have not ignored your points, i have actually tried to take the time and explain why i disagree with each, what i meant when i said you ignore them is that, for instance, you state over and over again that "we" "just woke up to the fact that pentax also sells premium glass, which costs "real money"" and that "the price shifted slightly so that now it's merely competitive, instead of dirt cheap, and all the cheapskates started screaming" (or words to that effect), after i and many people have pointed out that we are talking of 100% or near price increases, and huge comparative prices when looking at other brands, with hard figures to back that. it is frustrating to explain something and bring facts (numbers) to the discussion, repeatedly, and have somebody just carry on as if nothing happened.
of course there can be many explanations to what they seem to be doing, but i am not inclined to search for them. i have seen how big corporations work (pentax probably used to be a small one, but now with hoya it is probably different), and i can tell you it is useless to look for inside reason, sometimes things are jsut explained by blindness and stupidity. what i am concerned about is my choices, here and now, based on hard facts. i am not the only one who has to consider these choices.
Quote: The reality is, the paradigm has shifted, and Pentax no longer wants to be known as the cheap and dirty whore of the camera market.
We either get to suck it up, buy into someone else's system, or we can just boycott new lens purchases until they "come to their senses", but that might make the camera division unprofitable enough for them to close it down entirely...
my friend, there is a long way from stepping up and saying "that's it, we need you to _pay_ for the good stuff we produce" and saying "starting today, the same lens on the shelf of the shop you went in yesterday is 1500bucks, instead of 800bucks, because we say so" (and yes, our competitor sells something similar on the next shelf for nearly half the price, so WHAT). the difference is very simple, it's not about being fair or feeling warm and fuzzy inside about paying much less than anybody else, it is simply the difference between "yeah, i'll pay 10% more, **** it, it's worth it" and "what the **** have you been smoking? let's see, what does canon have on the market lately... hmm". you understand my problem now? i am not unreasonable, the prices for pentax premium glass used to be good or decent here, i could take "slightly pricey", because i like the system, the bodies, and so on, but we are not talking 100bucks extra for each lens here, we are talking well above 500 in most cases. that makes you think. and if it makes me think, i wonder how many other people are scratching their heads in the same general pattern...
if they need to make revenue somehow, the problem is very simple, from the point which they reached now: you will get 500bucks more on each lens, but only on each lens _you sell_, if you cross the line, you might not be selling enough to make the revenue you used to have (and i am pretty sure that in europe they are well past that point). this is basic economics, i am not such a stranger to these things as you might think.
i don't know, maybe they jsut decided to stop production altogether, and are working on a completely renewed lineup, sdm, quality checks, whole production line, and so on, to clean up the shit they got into with the 16-50, these sdm "scandals" and so on, and they raised the prices such just to slow demand and give them time to cleanup, without running out of stock, but if it's so, they better move fast, or there might be some impact on their market which they didn't take into account.
if they become a loss division as you suggested because of our "pettyness" , i am sorry, but they are doing it to themselves. again, i understand in us prices are still reasonable, and i appreciate that, but things are quite different here, and there are hints that the us trend is similar, if slower.
Quote: Thanks for the kind wishes for the dog, but it comes a couple of years too late. We lost Rollei (the one on the right) in 2006 and Leica in 2007.
A person couldn't have asked for better dogs than those two.
sorry to hear that, from your statement i gathered she was 11y old, so good health is all a dog that age can wish for. from my recollections of other discussions with you here, i think they had a happy life with you, so even though sad, it's all good, in the "grand scheme" of things. (if that makes any sense)