Originally posted by Asahiflex ... I'm more than convinced that pentax is/was working on a model between the K-5 and the 645D, purely by looking at the enormous price gap between those models.
Most of us suspect that they have a FF body at least partially prototyped, maybe very close to production-ready...
but the problem is lenses. If they don't start soon, 2-3 lenses per year, they will immediately be behind even if hey bring their FF prototype to production in a flash as soon as they can score a cheap/easy sensor deal.
If they try to play catch-up on lenses when FF sensors become cheap, they have no advantage over any mirrorless or other player that decides it's time to make a FF body. If they have not done the work to established themselves in the FF tier, they just leap in
behind already.
Coming out with 5 lenses or more per year to really catch up would probably be very, very expansive and hard to do. It would perhaps be within current design/production/manufacturing capacity to do 2-3 lenses per year using existing owned and leased factories and without having to expand engineering staff radically..
.