"Pentax to release a mirrorless camera"

Is Hoya actually still wanting to sell Pentax, only heard rumours about it and nothing more and that was all before the successful K-X was launched.

Well according to that Citigroup report (if it's genuine) they still plan on selling Pentax.

Which report would that be Gwyn, couldn't find it in the latest one.

The report in the OP. Bottom of age 4 of the PDF.

You mean this sentence?
Upside risks to our target price include: ... 2) decisions earlier than expected and
on better than expected terms for the sale of the Pentax camera operations or
the media operations in the memory disk business

I don't know what to make of that to be honest.

Or perhaps that, since they had been developing the 645D for many years (and crowing about its imminence for most of that time), the company would never recover from the humiliation of having to cancel it.

I expect several factors weighed in on Hoya’s decision to sanction the investment necessary for the 654D to go into production, but regardless of what they may have been it is a fact that it is now a real product that seems to have been well received by the market. As such it has increased the value of the Pentax business.

However, realistically this has been only a minor increase, and in my opinion from a very small base. Indeed in my view the business is unfortunately close to worthless on a going concern basis, but paradoxically that contributes to my now guarded optimism about the future of Pentax.

As I said I believe the lack of interest from possible strategic acquirors is telling if unsurprising. Furthermore, these people will usually pay over the odds relative to a purely financial investor, since they are typically able to extract synergies/cost savings by combining related businesses.

On the other hand for a financial investor no such cost savings are available, and they would then be left with a loss making/barely profitable business in a precarious market position. It is just not interesting with a very small chance of a profitable exit.

However, if Hoya have failed to find a buyer and were intent on getting rid of the business I consider they would normally have shut it down by now. I speculate the reason they haven’t is that they are fairly thinly capitalised, and may not be able to take the hit a write-off in assets resulting from a closure would entail.

If that is so, their only option is to invest in creating attractive products that can succeed in the market, in order to strengthen the market position with a view to a later sale. And that can only be good news for their customer base.

Furthermore, the recent brand defection of a number of high profile Pentax fans and staunch apologists, in my view smacks of what is known in the stock market as capitulation, where the last diehard supporters throw in the towel. That is a buying opportunity that can nevertheless only be pinpointed with hindsight, but I have a gut feeling we may have recently seen something akin to it.

I doubt very much that Hoya Corporation notices if a staunch supporter of their products "defects" to another brand.

Marketing people don't give a damn about existing customers anyway. I'm sick of every time I go to buy something that I've bought before either the product has been changed or the packaging/name has been changed and I'm left uncertain about buying something that I was certain about before before I entered the shop, so I finish up looking for an alternative

True, but I suspect there is still a catch here and corporations are not very good at spotting it. A few folks defect and are ignored by marketing, but unseen by the corporate radar these folks are also the high-spending, influential, opinion-forming customers and it probably doesn't take all that many of them to start a chain reaction. Suddenly, those few defectors turns into a rush for the exits as regular customers take fright and, too late, Mr Corporation has a serious problem. I'm not suggesting this is the case here, but depending on how Pentax reacts to a changing market it could happen. After all, it happened before when Pentax failed to anticipate something called digital a decade or so ago. The buzz of the moment is now FF, but we don't yet know whether there will turn out to be some kind of tipping point in its favour.

FF has always been a buzz, there hasn't gone a year by without a rumour about it
I truly believe that Pentax is too late to jump ship now to 135 format because they have brought out a full DA range for APS-C only, only a very few lenses are also officially for the 135 format.
Now we also have these speculation about EVIL camera.
If all these rumours would be true, Pentax will be supporting 4 different exchangeable lens formats next year, do you believe that yourself?

If i need to guess what Format would be it, 135 or EVIL I think it would be the EVIL pentax might bring out.
The reason for that is that they need to develop new wide angle lenses for the 645D and pretty fast to make the camera more attractive so that basically means that for the upcoming year lens development on the APS-C format will be most likely low. Because I don't believe Pentax have the resources to expand the development line.
Also because off that I don't see Pentax creating a new 135 format line either in the upcoming years even.
EVIL camera has the advantage that it can use the DA lens range with an adapter so the pressure to create a full extended lens range is far less, also for the people such camera are interested for too.
If they can redesign the DA18-50 DA17-70, DA50-200 and DA55-300 I believe it would be enough for such cameras for now.
Or they might even play it so that they design a entirely new mount for the APS-C DSLR instead to make their current camera with mirror smaller too. Low budget will be EVIL cameras and the higher range would be DSLR maybe, because electronic gets cheaper and mechanical gets more expensive relative speaking?

Just my view on the whole though.

As much as I'd like FF (I love close-up wide angles in low light...) I also think EVIL is far more likely as a medium-term route, its new technology and this is very important when it comes to actually selling products to consumers - the DSLR market is, basically, completely saturated with almost-identical black lumps, Jo(e) Consumer needs something different and new, its much easier to sell "new" technology than "upgrades", especially if it appears to offer convienence advantages (e.g. rubbish but smaller LCD TV's instead of CRT's).

Also, Nikon have said they are going that way... they know they need to come up with new products so people will throw out and replace their perfectly good cameras, and slight incremental upgrades or cheaper technology won't do that...


I'm also happy to skip FF and go straight to MF if the prices can drop to £2-3k levels in a few years....

I was cruising through the Sony NEX forum and came across this .......a guy using a Pentax 50mm f1.4 prime with the Sony NEX 5. He assured me he had the appropriate adapter from Amazon..John



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