Who won this in the end and what was the winning photo? Cheers.

Hopefully once you get it back you won't need a replacement. If you were considering something else I can't think why you would pay out to get that one fixed.
Welcome to PU by the way!

Such phishing attempts would be considered highly commercially sensitive. No way would they let on to you any future developments. If anyone did they would now be ex-Ricoh employees.
Ricoh have no idea as to whether you work for the opposition so will play safe presuming you do.

These are early prototypes of planed cameras, front and back.

Even if they have a new camera coming next week, do you really think they could tell you before its official announcement? Sebastian would be in line for the sack for reporting out of turn if he knows (which I doubt.)
The person who might know would be the Ricoh president, Shinobu Takahashi, who was to have judged that photo competition run through SRS by Mid March but as of writing no announcement has been made.
So if they can't announce things they should have done by now, what chance of announcing something else?!
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Not really. It's more a case of operator indecisiveness! Don't like that touch screen though.

Hope you've got a large hard-disk.

Try Digital Camera Utility 5 that came on the CD with the camera.
Update it to the latest version here.
If you install just the update (which would be sensible) it normally requests you to insert the original CD for a licensing check.

Anyone able to compare the new one against the old version?

Just in case they've lost the design in their reorg , does this help?

http://pentaxstudy.bufsiz.jp/Lensdesign/SMC-PM35_14/SMC-PM35_14_Design.htm
or (sort of) translated:
https://translate.google.com/translate?tl=en&u=http://pentaxstudy.bufsiz.jp/Lens...