[Des]

And a collection of three Japanese TV commercials from Pentax's heyday (featuring the famous "Pentax Girl"):

That is such a hoot.

I wonder what happened to Pentax Girl. She is probably now berating her great-grandchildren for taking nude selfies, annoying people going about their lives, driving like idiots, hitchhiking and travelling alone through deserts and for celebrating irresponsible and dangerous behaviour. "Never happened in my day", she says. The old negs are safely hidden away. She is still using the Takumar on her K-1.

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Last edited by Des; 12-18-2022 at 04:35 PM.

[kmac1036]

I recently was having a discussion with a friend and told him that Pentax was once the #1 selling camera company, but he disputed that.
Anyways, was Pentax once one of the top 3 or what?

I think they were back in the manual focus film days. No matter what their main loyalty was, more times than not, the backup hardware was a K1000. From what I’ve heard from gray beards willing to admit it anyway ;-)

Pentax was late to the digital party, was slow on AF development, got passed around too much with mergers and acquisitions (namely the screw job Hoya pulled), smartphones, and made too good a quality product. I just finally upgraded from a K7. Still got a K200D and a K10D, both work fine. The K3-3 feels like a tank too.

I stuck with them because of the lenses I’d have to rebuy and the ones I wanted are out of reach price wise on the other platforms. I’d love to go mirrorless but from what I’ve seen with the motion sickness you can get on the viewfinder, I’m prone to that already for certain things. Pentax tried to go mirrorless and the paid off cannikon snobs doing reviews panned Pentax so bad the sales went nowhere, so discontinued the products (Q series and K-01).

[Pål Jensen]

2. By 1976 Asahi Optical was the last of the Japanese major brands to give up the M42 mount, when everyone else had realized that bayonet is faster and more suited for communication between lens and camera.

While Asahi and Olympus were camera companies that tried their luck in medical technology, Canon, Minolta, Ricoh, Konishiroku (Konica) and Kyocera (Yashica) became extremely successfuly in printing and copying technology. Canon soon became a universal and quite independent high-tech company with their own semiconductor development branch. Long story short, by 2000 everyone else was significantly larger than Asahi Optical and obviously had more money to spend on R&D as well as marketing.

Fuji was later than Pentax in abandoning M42 mount but they may not have been considered a major brand in cameras at the time,
Canon made calculators. The price drop of the same during the 70s almost drove them out of business. It is said that if the AE-1 had failed the company would have gone bankrupt.....

---------- Post added 12-19-22 at 07:23 PM ----------

I think there was a time when the Pentax Spotmatic was the most popular SLR out there. And if you throw in the K1000 sales, since it's pretty much just a Spotmatic with a bayonet lens mount, it might be the best-selling SLR design of all time. .

The Spotmatic, ME, ME Super, maybe even the P30, sold better than the K1000 and managed that volume in a few years, whereas the K1000 used more than 20 years. The K1000 wasnt popular, or even sold in all markets. I dont think it sold well in Europe...

---------- Post added 12-19-22 at 07:30 PM ----------

Pentax was late to the digital party, was slow on AF development,.

They were the pioneers and earlier than anyone else. All major companies except Minolta was not ready for AF back in 1985, mostly due to the fact that earlier attempts had not been very successful in the market. Pentax entry into AF as a system (the SFX), and not just as a feature, was simultaneous with Nikon and Canons and on par with Minolta and Nikon in performance. Canon EOS was ahead of all by 1987, but they also made the probably biggest SLR flop of all time in their first true AF camera the T80, released at the same time as the Minolta 7000 in 1985. This camera had only automodes chosen via pictograms and only three bulky AF lenses with motor in the lenses. It shows how Canon was seeing AF at the time; a feature for snapshooters exclusively. They even advertised that the camera had none of those confusing numbers other SLRs displayed !

[Just1MoreDave]

Is that a Toyota 2000GT in the second commercial?

And (I think) a Mazda Cosmo and a Fairlady Z.

[Fogel70]

Pentax had the largest market share in SLR in late 1960s.
With more than 600 000 Pentax SLRs produced in 1967 and 1968.

But the popularity on m42 mount fell in the early 1970s, so the production dropped to around half of that before K-mount was introduced.

In 1980 they produced more than a million SLRs, but then other brand sold a lot more SLRs too, so Pentax market share had decreased. And Canon had largest market share with closer to two million SLRs produced in early 1980s.

Some interesting information on production of manual focus SLR.
KniPPsen: Japanese SLR production numbers. Part 1: Nikon
KniPPsen: Japanese SLR production numbers. Part 2: Minolta
KniPPsen: Japanese SLR production numbers. Part 3: (Asahi) Pentax
KniPPsen: Japanese SLR production numbers. Part 4: Canon
KniPPsen: Japanese SLR production numbers. Part 5: Miranda

Total number of SLR produced
http://knippsen.blogspot.com/2017/12/slr-production-history-complete.html

[Michael Piziak]

Thanks all for your comments and replies.