Pentax K20D/K200D Launch Party 29th March 2008

Digital Camera Exchange are offering a special deal for the forum members of Pentax User. You can upgrade to the Pentax K20D / K200D with a really strong part-exchange deal, they will be offering £310 for a Pentax K10D body (good condition – no box needed, subject to seeing) (making the K20D - £589.99!!) which is a great deal considering K10D’s are going for about £300-350 on eBay second hand.

Plus, FREE Poster Print for every existing Pentax user, if you come to the launch day.

Special for Pentax user Forum users ONLY - Placing a pre-order/reserving a K20D for the launch day - They will get a FREE 4GB SD HC Sandisk Extreme III - Worth £49.99! and a FREE 2GB SD HC Extreme III for the K200D.

But you must reserve / pre-order for mail order / Notify Ben that you are going to the launch day!

If you are going please notify [email protected]

For more details click here

I would presume from this that the retail pricing is sticking at £899 then?

Whilst I do appreciate the efforts made to secure a deal of some kind for forum users, with the GX20 retailing at £699 with a kit lens, a better deal would be 'spend £699, save £200, have a K10D as a backup.'

Paying £200 for a badge really puts me off!

Whilst I may want some of the K20D's new capabilities, I can't say that I really need them. I'll wait a year or so until the firmware is sorted and the price has dropped.

I was an early adopter of the K10D, with which I am more than happy. It can teach me a lot more than I can teach it, so I'll be sticking with it for now at least. If the exposure issue with pre-A series lenses isn't fixed in the K20D, I'll not be buying one anyway. I have only 3 pre-A lenses, but I use them quite a bit . . . on my *istD . . . because they don't work properly on the K10D. That kind of shoots down Pentax's acclaimed 'backwards compatibility' claim.

I'm sure there's a retail outlet somewhere near Watford that'll be doing good deals too.

You guessed correctly Peter - if it was us you were meaning of course!

Watch this space....

Plenty of offers coming including a demo day in the middle of March


Chris

I can't make the 16th or the 22nd, so if you could work round those...

Will you have the new lenses to play with too?

Dan

I was, until now, allways more tempted to go for the Pentax labeled item but GBP 200 (Euro 300) for a Pentax badge is quite weird since Samsung did a large part of the electronics design work. If there is GBP 50 between the two I will buy a Pentax item but for a GBP 200 difference I will certainly go for the Samsung item. GBP 200 will never be a difference you will make up when you end up reselling the unit in a couple of years.

The other thing I just remembered about these retail price points is that the Samsung price also comes with the kit lens, the Pentax body only.

Could this actually mean a nearer to £300 price difference?

It's never as clear-cut as we may think. When older items get sold on eBay then the genuine Pentax lenses go for very good prices and the sought after rarer lenses go for sometimes amazing prices. The independent lenses of the same era go for very little and sometimes don't sell at all.

As regards Pentax and Samsung alternatives, in the more distant future it depends on where the relationship goes. It could be possible that ten years from now it will be difficult to persuade the uninformed buyer that the two are the same.

However, the choice is there now for us to make as we see things and whichever is chosen the results photographically will be excellent.

I agree with your comment about lenses John, but in my opinion modern DSLR's are consumers electronics and semi obsolete before they hit the shops.

If the current trend of a new model every 12-15 months continues and if each new model offers significant improvements, then I can't any 3 year old DSLR being worth very much at all.

Steve

Do you think DSLRs or even digital compacts will ever become collector's items?

I wonder if they will and think that they just might, because they are rather nice bits of engineering, even if they do become obsolete as "users".

I'm not hoarding them though!

For some maybe, but for me personally no. It does not matter how good the engineering inside is, the plastic body just does not do it for me and I say that as a 'ex polymer chemist'. Now if you put the K10 engineering into a LX or Super A body then that would be another matter.

Steve

At least collectors of DSLR's in the future will not have to pay a premium for film (if they can find it) and processing. Stick some batteries in and it'll work straight away, or should. Maybe they will be sought after, but not for a while yet I think. And all that depends on whether the file formats will still be supported in 10, 20, or 30 etc years to come.

In 30 years time we will be storing images captured by our eyes onto an embedded chip, capable of radio transmission. We will have the ability to display the captured images at will onto room sized panels created from nano particles sprayed via an aerosol .

Pentax will of course supply an image corection technology for our eyes

I'm one of the people who avoid older non Pentax lenses. I would buy them if I thought they were nearly as good as Pentax's - but I rarely can find enough (if any) info about them online to get an idea - because the lenses were made in the pre-internet days. (And I don't have access to paper catalogues etc with the specs, let alone any test data).

Future generations though will have lots of information on the independent lenses of today at their fingertips - so will be able to make a more educated choice. Hopefully that will stop the values of the better models plummeting too much.

However, I accept that the "Pentax" badge is still likely to automatically add some value. But what you buy now is a question of how long-termist you want to be, or can afford to be.