Originally posted by monochrome Make good on? What did Pentax ever do to you?
Frankly, Pentax is so small in the USA that Jim Malcolm probably IS personally involved in these details.
They're doing much, MUCH better now than they were two years ago. Jim was astonished at how bad dealers relations were and how little of Pentax infrastructure remained when he took over. There was considerable industry buzz that Ricoh should simply go to a complete internet marketing model and broker North America altogether. Thankfully they've taken the long view and are investing the time and effort to rebuild.
A great deal hinges on the K-1. 645z is a signature, halo product. K-1 is a leader product that regular people can actually aspire to owning rather than just dreaming about. Marketing, at least in the USA, is much bigger than merely giving a camera to a weblog. You have to have product to distribute, dealers to distribute it and infrastructure to support the dealers. It's a complete corporate package. They don't have it yet. Ricoh will get there, but it will take longer and cost more than they thought.
Be patient. It's a process.
There you go, being yourself again. First of all, I don't think most posters here know or understand your almost irrational defense of Jim Malcolm (I don't). Maybe he's family to you? You won't admit that, currently, Pentax's marketing is worse than Panasonic's, which is an insult. Fine. The point still stands - you have one of YouTube's most famous photo personalities begging for a K-1 to test, and you can almost be assured that he'll treat the camera fairly (more fairly than DPR, at least). So...
Where's Jim Malcolm graciously saying to Tony Northrup "I've heard your message and I will personally send you a review unit as soon as we can"? That's all it takes. It's obvious Ricoh can't go around giving free cameras to whoever claims to be an "online personality" or whatever. But they should know that, even if it costs them $1400 (that's probably the cost of the K-1 to distributors) and only five spectators of Tony's channel make good on their preorders, they've already made a small profit. And I'm guessing it's going to be quite a few more than that.
DISCLAIMER: I'm not affiliated with Tony Northrup in any way. Actually, I find most of his videos a snoozefest (i.e. boring), and the fact he uses his attractive wife to promote his bland reviews doesn't sit well with me. Still, he has a massive following over the Internet, and caters especially to DSLR users. If he publicly stated that the K-1 was a winner, I'm quite sure there'd be more preorders. How many more I can't know, nor can Ricoh know, but if all it takes is four more purchases at release time to cover their costs, well, they'd be stupid not to jump on the chance.