Originally posted by RonHendriks1966 Being around in 3-5 years is a good question for more companies with the current decline in sales that is looking to stretch out well into 2016 (after starting the decline in the end of 2012). A FF K-3 would be the safest choice for Pentax.
That's not in fact very safe. The K3 was consistently marked down compared to the D7100 by many sites I've looked at, primarily because it wasn't made by Nikon so far as I can see, and in one incredible case because it was a quote "photographer's camera" and thus a wee bit too complex for the reviewer. Really, you can't make up some of the reasons for preferring your main advertisers over anyone else. Besides, Ricoh would need to drop in improved AF, improved flash, wifi, IBIS, video, a better jpeg engine and so on - thus a new camera wouldn't really be all that like the K3. No matter how Ricoh do it, they are looking at a very tough situation and nothing is safe, imho.
One thing I'd like to see would be Ricoh moving to online sales using a super-duper new website and facing the fact that much of their B&M business is in dead-end stores or doesn't really exist anyway. So a big chain carries their stock? Actually, it just has a few examples on a website and nothing in a real store. What a BS. This would cut out the middleman and leave Ricoh free to offer full stocks in a few select "Pro dealers" only, decent, clean, upscale places with trained staff. These would act as much as marketing fronts as anything else, and if they covered main population centres only then they would cover most of the available custom. There's one Pentax pro dealer here that left me feeling the place would need fumigating before it was safe to enter. You could just as easily find a mummified rodent in there as a camera. This kind of retail experience strikes me as a left-over from the old camera world of the 1970s or 1980s, at least where I live.