Yup, clearly currency movements are a factor but in no way does this explain the total magnitude of the price hikes.

In my view there are two possible additional explanations that I have alluded to in past posts.

1) Pentax marketing whizz-kids have adjudged the K7 to be so attractive that hoards of semi-pro photographers will be beating a path from other brand allegiances to buy it with associated lens goodies no matter what the price

2) Pentax have been told by Hoya in no uncertain terms that they better get the buisness profitable sharpish or else it's curtains, and having failed to attract the requisite customer base with a cheapo pricing strategy have no choice other than jack 'em up and pray that sales volumes don't decline too precipitously.

Personally I think the reason is #2, with future highly negative attendant implications for second hand prices if Pentax folds, as I now believe is highly likely.

There are new Nikon product announcements expected within the next few month that I am now awaiting with great interest. . .

In particular pros who require poor autofocus with consistent underexposure and a chronic inability to hold the camera level

I couldn't agree more.

In my experience my K10d underexposes between 0 and 1 1/3 EV; as far as I am concerned there is no one size fits all compensation.

What I tend to do is fire off a shot and then immediately check the histogram. Others will be able to explain its interpretation much better than I can but I am looking for a curve that doesn't fall off a cliff on the left; if that is the case I progressively bump up the compensation accordingly.

One other thing; I have no idea whether other dslr makes consistently underexpose but to argue that in the case of Pentax this is a feature is simply a joke. I shoot jpegs for the same reason as you, and if fiddling around with Raw converters is a prerequisite for getting proper exposures, Pentax shouldn't include a jpeg converter in the first place.

I have had mixed experience with Dell laptops (great customer service, lousy hardware design) but if you are buying a new PC now I believe you need to pay very careful attention to which precise processor you are getting; all core2duos are not alike!

The new Windows 7 (in shops by the end of October) has been getting rave reviews. Apart from being significantly more resource efficient than Vista one of the features creating a big buzz is virtualisation support, which means that you can run several different operating system environments on the single machine.

Of immediate interest is that the high end versions will support a Win XP mode for backwards applications compatibility, but this really is a fairly exciting feature and developers will almost certainly find clever new ways of exploiting it as they get to grips with the technology.

However, in order for this to work you need a processor model offering virtualisation support, and there have already been reports of more aggressive discounting of models that don't provide this; trying to research processor model capabilities can be a bewildering choice of gobbledygook code numbers but if you are about to buy a new pc I believe it is well worth your time to get to grips with this. Check out http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=946&page=2 for a list of compatible Intel cpus.

Shim, UK car plants belonging to Japanese manufacturers make cars; that is they make bodies, engines, maybe gearboxes, transmission systems, etc. Of course they buy many parts in but they make the big bits.

What is it you believe Pentax actually *manufacture* in Vietnam?

We know they don't make the sensor, but I would also be very surprised if the electronics don't come from contract manufacturers in Taiwan, and it would be madness to have small scale plastic facilities to make the bodies.

Maybe they make a few bits and bobs locally but the native Vietnamese cost component on the body side is *assembly* not *manufacture*; in other words we are talking the labour cost of putting it all together which has to be a relatively minor.

Regarding lens production I am far from sure they make these in Vietnam. In any case if you do a search on youtube you will see various vids on how this is done; this largely involves many heavily automated processes using different machines with very small actual labour input, and I think it is a safe assumption that precision engineering industrial equipment of that nature is not made by local Vietnamese companies.

In other words, hardly any costs are locally denominated in Vietnamese currency.

Unfortunately you have managed to muck this up because solving the differential equation for selling price/unit gives identical pricing at volume of 1,000 and 200 units respectively; clearly not what you intended to show.

Further, while your example may at first glance sound superficially plausible its simply doesn't hold water on even cursory inspection.

As regards camera bodies, the vast majority of direct costs are from outsourced components (eg sensor, electronics, plastics etc) that you simply have no control over.

For camera lenses, the direct variable costs are negligible; some glass, plastics and a little metal. The difference up to final selling price is likely largely made up of depreciation of capital equipment (including testing and measurement) and margin, of which the former is most certainly a substantial component. Therefore there is in fact likely to be a significant increase in per unit cost/decrease in margin at reduced volumes where capacity is not fully utilised.

And I am sorry to say that if you honestly believe your concept of "Recessionary Marketing" - where you jack up prices during a severe economic downturn - is somehow an exciting business innovation you are quite frankly delusional.

As for the wider question of lens price increases, the way multinationals without local manufacturing tend to work is that they agree budgets with foreign subsidiaries in local currencies and then hedge their net currency exposure at the HQ level, typically via instruments called currency swaps.

The quantity of hedging will fluctuate around 100% of budgeted exposure for the current financial year and then typically decline thereafter, with differences in actual strategies determined by the extent to which the finance director fancies himself as a currency trader.

And with the budget period tied to the reporting cycle, which in the case of Japanese companies invariably runs to the end of March, a delay in passing on the effect of currency movements should always be expected.

As regards the value of the yen, there are many fundamental factors that have an impact eg the carry trade (where speculators borrowed cheaply in yen to invest in anything that moved overseas only to see those leveraged investments collapse and their loans called), balance of payments, wild Japanese monetary expansion since the late 90s, and critically that Japan is the only G7 country with a significant pool of domestic savings.

However, these factors are insignificant in comparison to the astronomical flows attributable to speculative foreign exchange trading flows from banks, hedge funds, private traders, etc. Therefore with animal spirits running the show, exchange rates will invariably overshoot fundamental values; I'll personally be looking for a final high in the yen sometime next year, but don't forget that yen strength has not only been evident against the pound but also against euros and dollars.

If that is so then you'll also need to factor in the cost of Adobe Premiere, and most probably a new workstation with a fancy motherboard, quad-core processor and 64-bit operating system so you can run at least 16-32 Gb of Ram to make it usable.

Now I happen to have the latter but I certainly don't have the time to fiddle around learning a new adobe application or generally undertaking video editing.

I'd also wager that the potential market for a video capable Pentax dslr interested in shooting the next Palm D'Or winner is outnumbered at least 100 to 1 by people who want to shoot informal videos of friends and family, or everyday occurrences worthy of documenting for some reason; if I had even the slightest suspicion Pentax were gearing the K7 to the former segment, I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole.

To me that sounds fully on par with "the dog ate the autofocus". What a joke.

Presumably what this really means is the feedback from beta testers was that autofocus was so lousy as to be unusable.

Say what!!!??

Can you confirm whether that is on the pre-production prototype only, or it is the intended specification?

And thanks for your report.