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10-21-2011, 07:39 PM   #361
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Just a thought.... Can Pentax use the old A850/A900 sensor coupled with Prime II (or Dual Prime II) engine with Dual SDXC and make a FF camera just to keep the price 1800 to 2300 USD price point will it sell? Its like a full featured A900 with all K-5 functionality and features.

10-21-2011, 07:55 PM   #362
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Before we see a Pentax FF body we will first see a reintroduction of FA (D-FA) glass. When you see Pentax redesign the FA 28-70 into a D-FA* 28-70 you will know the FF is not far away. The first sign will be new glass. It is possible they introduce everything at once, but I think they will follow Sony and introduce new glass a year or two before they put FF bodies on the market. This assumes that Ricoh decides that FF DSLR's are worth the R&D cost.

At this point I think a mirror-less FF is the best investment, or at least a good first step towards a FF DSLR. The new AF system in the EP-3 is faster than any Pentax DSLR. High quality lenses like the 12mm f/2 are selling faster than Olympus can make them. The NEX-7 will be Sony best selling camera. Pentax makes great prime lenses and a FF mirror-less could be compact and provide amazing IQ.
10-21-2011, 07:56 PM   #363
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QuoteOriginally posted by Aristophanes Quote
At any price point over $1,000 the potential market drops by about 50% for every $100 above $1,000. You wind up with an aggregate market about 5% of your total gross revenues from your APS-C line.
The problem with the internet is anyone can make themselves sound like an expert by citing bogus figures, and people will believe it because it sounds athoratative. Please cite your research on this figure, 'cuz it smacks of 'just pulled it out of thin air.'
10-21-2011, 08:16 PM   #364
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QuoteOriginally posted by Aristophanes Quote
At any price point over $1,000 the potential market drops by about 50% for every $100 above $1,000. You wind up with an aggregate market about 5% of your total gross revenues from your APS-C line.
I guess based on that I'm in the 99th percentile because I want one. Does that make me brave or foolhardy? *shrug*

10-21-2011, 08:18 PM   #365
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I think that lens development could be the right move for Ricoh, even above creating a FF body, tho they will have to do something reasonably big, and soon, to prove to their customer base that their not going to sit and watch the photo world pass by. If it's just another mirror-less or even a 4/3rd's they will have missed the mark and just become a lemming. It's time for thinking outside the box and making their name by wowing the world. A strong R&D into lens development with sales to all manufacturers platforms at reasonable prices could give them the money to fund what they want. But I don't know if that will be their forte. They seem to be heavy in electronic parts and thermal media including office and production printing. Hopefully they'll just give Pentax money and manufacturing support and leave them to their own expertise.
10-21-2011, 08:36 PM   #366
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I cannot emphasize strongly enough that Ricoh bought PENTAX in order to make money in the photography market. Given that Ricoh is much larger than Nikon, there is no reason PENTAX-Ricoh would not be able to attempt to develop a full-frame camera body and lenses and enter the full-frame market.

--DragonLord
10-21-2011, 08:46 PM   #367
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QuoteOriginally posted by DragonLord Quote
I cannot emphasize strongly enough that Ricoh bought PENTAX in order to make money in the photography market. Given that Ricoh is much larger than Nikon, there is no reason PENTAX-Ricoh would not be able to attempt to develop a full-frame camera body and lenses and enter the full-frame market.

--DragonLord
That depends entirely on what percent of their business Ricoh intends to make Pentax. In terms of raw overall company value, Ricoh blows Nikon out of the water, sure, but if you split it down to just their imaging division vs. Nikon's....

10-21-2011, 09:23 PM   #368
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QuoteOriginally posted by Aristophanes Quote
There's no such thing as a bare bones FF. Not at the sensor price points.

If the sensor costs $600 alone, that's a minimum $2,000 for a body if you include all the other inputs + a viable profit margin. At any price point over $1,000 the potential market drops by about 50% for every $100 above $1,000. You wind up with an aggregate market about 5% of your total gross revenues from your APS-C line.

But...you also lose customers if you skimp on features. So you get a $1,600 FF but it has not very good AF (compared to a D700) and no SR (to save on size). It's less rugged, and maybe no WR (to keep warranty costs down). 3 FPS to save on size of the added circuitry, and so on.

And you keep lens prices down to keep the total package cost reasonable, so no constant 2.8's, only constant f/4's, right? At which point you lose a lot of bird and sports/action shooters.

So what you've gained in absolute market share in going bare bones you've lost in discrete segments. That's the price/value dilemma. Once you go premium price you have to go all the way with features at least comparable to the competition. The competition is the Nikon D700 and/or the Alpha A900. That's what a Pentax FF will require in terms of size/price/features to be competitive with enough customers.

All Canon has to do to destroy you is sell 1 EOS-1D X and take its profit margins forcing you to sell 7 Pentax FF K-1's to return the same margins per body. If you only sell 6 your shareholders suffer, at 5 your assembly line shuts down. Sony with the A850 tried to compete on price from a larger installed base than Pentax and they saw that price was NOT the determinant in sales of camera bodies over $1,000.....features was the determinant. That is what draws the consumer in. The situation Sony found was that a sub-$2,000 FF body attracted pretty much no Canon or Nikon customers. Sony would have bankrupted the camera division going down that path. And for every Sony customer looking at the $1,850 Alpha 850 there were 10 customers buying a $6,000 D3x and 30 buying a D700 at $2,450.

Heck, there were 2 buying the Alpha 900! So Sony gained itself $300 per unit more by killing the "market share" A850. If even half of those chased away by the $300 price difference left for Canikon, Sony still got more than it would have otherwise per unit. Sony proved that it was not possible to have a low-end FF and still stay profitable

And Sony makes the sensors.
However what your calculations ignore, from the point of profitability, is that camera makers gain a lot more from the sales of lenses than they do from DSLR camera profit margins. From the sale of every K5, D700, a900 or 5dII the manufacturers probably sell between another US$5,000 and 10,000 of their own glass over the space of another 3 years to that buyer. What your theory does prove though is the cost of buying the camera in the first place is not the determining factor, so long as kept within reason, rather than features - something for which Pentax is rather more than well regarded.

IMO for Pentax to compete with CaNikon/Sony they need to continue doing exactly what they have done with the K5. A small form factor WR & SR enabled K1 with small upgrades on all the K5s bells & whistles and of course with the added features that the batch of current FF cameras provide (including being able to use APS-C lenses on FF), would draw large support from the Pentax community and beyond, not just for the camera but for the chance to use Pentax's key advantage, small form factor lenses. What a package that would be.

A new US$3,000 - $3,500 FF K1 with a road map to release (or re-release updated FAs, 85s, 250-600s etc.) maybe another 10 lenses over the following 3 years would have me drooling and saving my pennies like crazy.

Last edited by Frogfish; 10-21-2011 at 09:33 PM.
10-21-2011, 09:24 PM   #369
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I'm sure Ricoh can afford to slide some funding from their office sales side towards R&D and production for their imaging line. As long as it does not compromise their office sales side in anyway, maybe even taking a slight hit on overall profit margin for a year to dump into the imaging and become an "overall" front runner in the imaging department! imagine if they had a FF body out right now.. With the K-r, K-5, 645D and if they had a FF(probably something close to a D3s/x), that would be one heck of a full range competitive line up!
So now I guess we can hope for this next generation to show something like K-s(or whatever letter), k-3(APS-C), K-1(FF), 645D*II (or whatever the next gen of it will be).. I think this is the type of lineup Pentax/Ricoh needs to continue to throw down the gauntlet.. but this time follow it up with WORLD WIDE heavy marketting.. not just on the Asian pacific rim.

QuoteOriginally posted by Clinton Quote
I guess based on that I'm in the 99th percentile because I want one. Does that make me brave or foolhardy? *shrug*
Well considering the exact scientific calculations gathered to come up with all these numbers around here.. I guess I'm in the same boat!
10-21-2011, 09:26 PM   #370
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QuoteOriginally posted by Aristophanes Quote
... At any price point over $1,000 the potential market drops by about 50% for every $100 above $1,000. You wind up with an aggregate market about 5% of your total gross revenues from your APS-C line.
Source?


QuoteQuote:

..Sony A850... Alpha 850...Alpha 900! ...A850....

Using a 2008 sensor release from Sony as an inescapable roadmap to failure for Ricoh in 2012,13,14 is a bit like telling Apple not to bother with the ipad because the Newton was such a disaster.

Sony released a body that had worse noise performance than it's competitors, did not have live view, had sluggish AF, and carried the Sony name. The biggest sin of all: lenses. Not many, and the ones they did have were either priced too high, or just plain boring and bad, for the most part.

QuoteQuote:
And Sony makes the sensors.

Yes, they do. And they're excited enough about the new stuff they're getting off the wafers that they may release three FF bodies in 2012. They see the new tech's capability... and they see the new margins they can score.

They also know what they have in the pipeline. I'm guessing the FF prototype panic they have going on over there now is as much about positioning themselves for what's coming through that pipeline as it is about what's going to be released next month.

Ricoh probably smells that too.


QuoteQuote:
If Pentax gets in the FF game.. it will, for technical reasons, have to be a camera body as big as the D700 or A900
Nah, I'm guessing the K-1 will be between the K-5 and the D700 in size. Again, using 2008 bodies that were never even claimed by their makers to be "the smallest possible" to set a limit on body size in 2012 or 2013 or 2014 is shortsighted.

QuoteQuote:
. I suspect that Pentax has FF skunkworks going already, but the financial outlook for a camera that expensive without moving market share from Canikon is pretty much a deal killer. When a price war between Canikon starts to drive down FF costs, then, maybe, Pentax can get in...
18-month plan ^^. If Ricoh wants to be in when the sweet spots are golden for them, they have to move sooner rather than later. Lenses have to get made, too.


QuoteQuote:
I write these types of responses every week!
I was wondering if you were on vacation, or something. We're already like 25 pages in.

.

Last edited by jsherman999; 10-21-2011 at 09:49 PM.
10-21-2011, 09:32 PM - 1 Like   #371
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Reached my closet to grab my ME and look thru its big, bright viewfinder. Reality shock.

Pentax, you can keep releasing cameras with APS-C sensor, I don't care. In fact, I enjoy, as smaller sensors are always improving and giving enough megapixels that fit in more compact bodies at lower prices.

But please, pretty please, give us decent viewfinders. They are the raison d'être of SLRs, without that you're better off just buying anything with a back LCD. Having AF is not an excuse for sucking at viewfinders either.

Either figure out how to fit a big and bright viewfinder on your APS-C camera, or throw the whole mirror apparatus out of the window and figure out how to make good, high-dynamic-range, true-to-life EVFs, because the current incarnation of SLRs (from all brands) suck compared to the experience of using the cameras pioneered by Pentax.

If you do that, I swear I will tattoo PENTAX (by Ricoh) on my neck.

Probably.
10-21-2011, 09:41 PM   #372
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QuoteOriginally posted by Aristophanes Quote
There's no such thing as a bare bones FF. Not at the sensor price points.

If the sensor costs $600 alone, that's a minimum $2,000 for a body if you include all the other inputs + a viable profit margin. At any price point over $1,000 the potential market drops by about 50% for every $100 above $1,000. You wind up with an aggregate market about 5% of your total gross revenues from your APS-C line.
Yes I do feel the need to comment on this statistic too, and would like to see a source, as it's totally illogical.

Let's take the K5. Using any sort of starting figure as an example. So they sell 250,000 units at US$1,500 but had the price remained static at US$1,700 it would only have sold 62,500 units ? Not a chance. The figure will always be a lot higher than that because of your existing user base.
10-21-2011, 10:09 PM   #373
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I remember getting my first "real" camera. It was a K-1000. I was around 12 or 13 years old, so this was circa 1985-86. All we had to do was go to Montgomery Ward and buy the camera. I got to hold it in my hands and feel it before I bought it.

The reason I support the idea of a Pentax FF camera is to get the brand back into the hands of professionals. Once that happens, the market trickles down to advanced amateurs, then to rank amateurs.

A successful FF camera that pros use, with the glass to support it means that someday I'll be able to go to Best Buy and get a Pentax DSLR camera, and not have to drive to New York City to get one or buy one sight unseen off the Internet.
10-21-2011, 10:09 PM   #374
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QuoteOriginally posted by Frogfish Quote
...would have me drooling and saving my pennies like crazy.
Hi
I would even consider flying cattle class for 6 months to offset the cost on a FF

Greetings
10-21-2011, 10:14 PM   #375
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I don't agree it needs to happen at all….

you keep doing excellent APS-C models and you are fine. Also Sony cut off the FF model line. So far, not sure if they are going to continue that. This means their core dev goes to APS-C which is incidentally the sensor Pentax uses.

I agree that going FF at least for now, it's a diversion of Pentax resources. I rather have them focus on key things that are different and make them work.

For example- a programmable camera is far more important. Imagine being able to have really wild different "films" made by 3rd parties for the camera. That would be quite unique.

- Raist
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