Originally posted by rparmar If Ricoh can bring out a Pentax 35mm sensor camera at a reasonable price without sinking the brand, great! But my evaluation is that a company with such small market share would only lose money on this attempt.
The only problem for Pentax is to source a good FF sensor. Everything else is a piece of cake, they already have the mount, the technology, even some lenses. I can't believe the investment has to be that big. At least for the body. For the lenses it's another matter, they cannot really resurrect the old FA* zooms. For a small (small in market share, Richoh is quite big actually) company like this the best is to outsource some of their development. They already cooperated with Tokina to spread their lenses R&D to Nikon/Canon. They could try to approach Sigma or Tamron for re branding some of their FF lenses instead of trying to do everything by themselves. They would have a good zoom line-up while concentrating on high margin small Limited primes.
They may not sell a lot of FF cameras but is it an argument when they sell the ultra low volume 645D (which BTW reuses almost all the electronic components from the K series)?