Originally posted by Rondec I don't believe the kx is selling the DA 55-300 lenses. Most of the people buying the kx are buying it with the "kit" DA-L 55-300. Unless Hoya is diverting resources from making their bread and butter zooms to do something else behind the scenes, I have no idea what is going on.
I had not though of this before, and you are mostly (although some kits I've seen have been sold with the original one, either by mistake or on purpose, I'm not sure, but it sure makes one hell of a deal!) correct about this, and maybe Pentax realized that they would not be selling as many of them, so they decided to stop making and stocking them, in favor of the new light version.
They recently released new "L" (as in light, not the Canon L, that would be too good to be true) lenses for the 18-55mm and the 50-200mm so it would be interesting to see if the stock has changed on those ones as well.
Edit: This is my 2500th post!