Originally posted by Horseonthefly From reading the release it appears they may have spent more time making it look like an slr than making it work like one. Though I would suppose that the true test will be in the sample pics.
Last time I heard, most (maybe all) Pentax compacts have been designed and manufactured by Taiwanese company Abico for some years. I heard this in a job interview there two years back.
This may not be well known outside the industry, but it's actually a common practice among camera brands today to subcontract manufacturing and even design to this kind of ODM/OEM contractors. You get lower price and sometimes better QC than Japanese contractors. I heard the lens of LX3 is designed by another Taiwanese company Asia Optical and manufactured in Burma.
Abico designs the lens, electronics and firmware of the cameras they produce, but not the image processors, which they mostly use off-the-shelve solutions by Zoran. Pentax is only involved in things like providing experience on tuning color reproduction. This is why these cameras are generally boring, and will continue to be so.
I don't know who actually designed the looks of these cameras, but the metallic finish of the I-10's top plates looks so cheap it got to be designed by Abico.
I actually quite like the design of the H90 though, too bad it doesn't seem too interesting in other areas.