Originally posted by jsherman999 Asking your preferred vendor for an enhanced upgrade path is allowed. Right now it's K-5 @ $1300 -----> 645D @ $10,000, and that 645D might as well be a Canon, because it's a different mount.
Something everyone should keep in mind here - a FF offering by Pentax/Ricoh strengthens K-mount in almost every possible way, including the aps-c tier, because it's all part of the same product silo.
Realistically the 645D is not an upgrade path. That's like going from a Honda Civic to a 5 ton truck. It's a separate silo by design. It's priced for maximum margins at low sales volumes, and undercuts the current MF offering substantially making it the value proposition in the world of delivery trucks.
An FF DSLR would have to fit into Pentax's 4-5% market share for the current DSLR (non-MF) market. It would likely not expand market share because the price point would be very high limiting gross sales (that's the Q's job). The smaller Pentax bodies of the last 2 generations of APS-C have done nothing to move market share. The larger K20D may have been a better seller than the K-7 and even the K-5.
If you're working within a constrained market share an FF DSLR from Pentax will shift resources from APS-C where the volumes are. All you're doing is moving the same customers around while trying to support the extreme costs of FF lens development with a tiny user base. Canon and Nikon have the economies of scale to do this; Sony is apparently willing to burn some capital to stay a player. Pentax does not have enough of either, even with Ricoh the owner.
This argues that FF would weaken the k-mount by stretching resources. Comments about how Pentax could do FF without fast zooms make the problem worse because now the Pentax FF is seriously under-spec compared to the competition, doing nothing to solve the migration scenario from the OP. You've just made the silo smaller. And so much for expanding market share. The same principle applies with the fantasy that an FF sensor can be supported technically in a much smaller body. You'd have to pay $800 for the sensor and then seriously downgrade the specs to get a reasonable price point and body size. How does a no-video, no live view, no SR, 2 FPS FF DSLR sound to you at $2,000 per body the size of a D300? And with only 5 primes and 3 moderate f/3.5-4 zooms and no third party support?
How do you market such a camera? The loss of features makes the argument to buy the other's guy's D300 with its smaller sensor!
Throw in the disruptive technologies of pellicle with EVF and mirrorless and the FF argument diminishes.
So Pentax opted for the Q which is positioned as a second camera for the all-in-one silo DSLR crowd, not intended to compete with the APS-C revenue stream like FF would inevitably do. It's also designed for some buzz and theoretically mass market potential. I question the price most of all, but the concept is sound and design interesting (it has a hot shoe for goodness sake).
It's far easier to keep people in the silo going downmarket than up.