Originally posted by Nass Well, this is me with my commercial hat on - read again and you'll see that I wasn't actually suggesting taking anything specifically away - but building new functionality that only works with Pentax lenses (as opposed to Sigma etc) and only Pentax would have. ie a 'system' USP. The sort of thing I'm thinking of can't be done with -a or -m lenses anyway.
This is probably sacreligious - no doubt the famous backwards compatibility helped, but seems to me it might be a bit of a two edged sword from Pentax' point of view. As in the body is only part of the consumer purchase, lenses are the rest. Take me as a typical example, I've got 3 21st century Pentax lenses but 7 20th century ones. In terms of revenue that's quite a large slice not going into Pentax but into some second hand dealer's pocket. Revenues that I imagine might have supported body or technology development.
*ducks*
The question is, where is the line between take away and new functions. Just look at P-TTL flash. it's implementation made many many lenses obsolete because they no longer supported TTL. FUnctionally, although people argue about how good or bad TTL VS P-TTL is, for the bulk of non A lens owners, there was no other way to look at it it was a take away.
As for new features that can't be incorporated into anything but a new pentax lens, for the life of me, I can't imagine much that is there which can't be accomplished with the existing lens mount.
If you again re-read many posts here, every time the decision comes as to what is a better investment, glass or bodies, the answer almost always comes back glass, because it has a much longer product life.,
YOu are now talking about shortening the product life of what amounts to a very small percentage of a photographer's total investment.
Sure, each of my DSLR bodies cost a lot, but what about the cost of replacing all my lenses.
ALL 30 OF THEM just because some marketing @$$#@!& thinks up some new fangled widget that they determine is a must have.