Because the Kx was selling like hot cakes. And the end result is a two camera line-up priced about £500 apart, which I don't think is great strategy. I think the Kx had a good year left and the Kr should have been the middle ground. I wonder what happened to Kr sales once the Kx had gone and before the price came down. I bet some punters chose a different brand at the entry level - and once customers go elsewhere it's a job to get themn back.

I don't have the funds for those lenses, but I always enjoy seeing the results of their use. Good luck to anyone who can get hold of them.

When times are tough then companies concentrate on getting their core business back in shape, despite all the usual blah about synergy (no acquisition was ever announced without using the term synergy) and impressive expansion plans for a small division.

And I still remain very sceptical about how a company can make huge cuts in its core business and yet invest to grow a peripheral business. A lot of R&D has been poured into the Ricoh GXR and Pentax Q but surely those systems are strong rivals in a niche market. New products are required (particulary affordable compacts that stand out from the crowd) and pronto for any serious increase in market share.

Hopefully Ricoh will bring a lot more marketing savvy and understanding of the need to build a better network to properly exploit the products. And smarter quality procedures. For me Pentax's stroke of genius was the Kx and their stroke of madness getting rid of it. I hope Ricoh will think a better strategy and we won't see Pentax shifted along again in a few years.

Sounds about right, US$100million ballpark. It's less than 10% of the capitalisation of Ricoh. I think Hoya only ever really intended to grab the bits of Pentax they wanted and shift the rest on, which they have now done. Ricoh should be a much better product fit and I hope don't take the same approach, but the overall weakness of the business is the concern.

The card door is a little fiddly, but it's OK.

My one change would be the cable release socket door - I preferred the solid K20 version to the little rubber thing.

Cameras represent a very small proportion of Ricoh's business. The company has been doing rather poorly of late, falling behind competitors, and I think things would need to pick up substantially for this to be a good guarantor of long term stability, product investment and development.

In a business shedding 10% of its workforce it's difficult to see how they could envisage anything but costcutting (synergy in boardroom BS) as a strategy for the newly merged division.

The camera product ethos might fit well but for bigger picture reasons I regard this with a large degree of trepidation.

Sorted now, some approvals last night.

I have always found it amusing that Americans regard their country as the 'land of the free'. Just because it's in a song doesn't make it so. There are plenty of countries where freedom of opinion, expression and political persuasion is much more tolerated and always has been.

Photographers have been hassled in the UK too on bogus anti-terrorism grounds, although less so recently.

Which party?

No connection, never been to Bradford, nor Leeds. If our detectives are to be believed the real identity is obvious.