Without in any way wishing to impugn the integrity of Unlocker in posting those snaps I am surprised that everybody appears to be taking them as gospel truth.

Alarm bells rang when I saw what to me is clearly a K10 kit lens stuck on the front, pretty much identical to what resides in a dark corner of my bag. However, if the K7 is to make any claims to producing quality video I would have thought they must bundle it with a lens sporting an ultrasonic motor, so as to have usable sound free from annoying whirring during focusing.

Sure enough tracking back via the wordpress blog where the pictures are hotlinked from they are sourced from a message board on a site www.digitalFotoNetz.de. I haven't attempted to hack myself though the innuendo thereon with my schoolboy German in any systematic way, but I fear these pictures are likely the product of some enterprising photoshopper with too much time on his hands rather than of Pentax corporation.

If he had only layered in a 17-70mm f/4 SDM I would have been much more credulous

Are you serious? Poe's Law would seem to apply here:

See: http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/Poe%27s_Law

It is somewhat pointless to speculate too much on this topic given the launch is so close to hand, but I am excited by the prospects for this camera so a few comments nevertheless spring to mind.

First of all while you can always find people who will take different points of view, I am confident that the proverbial 9 out of 10 experts in competitive strategy would agree that one or both of Pentax and Olympus will drop out of the dslr market in the next few years, all other things being equal.

Hoya's financial report mentions persistent exceptional costs related to consultancy services, and I have little doubt this is the advice they will be getting, assuming they are hiring the right people.

For this reason, reports that the K7 will be a reboxed K20 albeit a little better seem unlikely to me; that would merely allow Pentax to stand still competitively, whereas what they urgently need is to grow market share substantially, say by a factor of at least 2-3 times.

Further, given the D5000 and D90 cameras are available relatively cheaply, a K7 with video but lacking autofocus is a me too product that just lets Pentax stand still, delaying the inevitable.

I have seen several consumer reviews bemoaning the lack of autofocus on these models, and notwithstanding technical challenges and differences, I believe the mass market will rightly reject a relatively expensive camera that can't even do what their cheapo point and shoot will.

However, in an era where the mass market is posting pictures and video to Facebook, etc, I believe the introduction of a useable dslr/video combo could transform the competitive landscape in much the same way as when digital displaced film; if Pentax play their cards right they have the potential to repair much of the damage done during that fiasco, especially if their solution is patentable.

I really hope they can get this right, because I want that product.

I don't see why it shouldn't be autofocus in movie mode. There are rumours of a Nikon D750 coming out with that functionality and there are surely various possible technical solutions.

If the new Pentax has this there is little doubt I'd buy myself one. I have recently been shooting more and more video snippets using my Canon Powershot S3, but it just isn't good enough for what I want in low light (video and stills).

At the same time it seems to me that Pentax's approach of in body stabilisation offers a potentially much lighter and more useable package for the kind of thing I want to do, compared to say a 5D Mk II and with some massive L series lens stuck on the end.

It think many old school photo buffs are seriously underestimating the popular attractiveness of a decent slr/video package; if Pentax can deliver on this it could radically transform their market position.

The unfortunate but poorly understood reality is that all windows PCs over time gradually develop a syndrome similar to Alzheimer’s due to the registry based architecture.

Tools like the excellent and free CCleaner http://www.ccleaner.com/ (formerly Crap Cleaner) can help to combat registry degradation, but the best solution is a clean windows install from time to time.

Even better, store a freshly installed windows and applications environment hard disk image with something like Acronis to save yourself subsequent reinstall misery.

And don’t forget to tell friends and family about this to save those requiring basic web browsing and email from forking out on new hardware only to watch that die a slow death, when a complete software facelift works miracles on their existing box.

Your site looks nice and clean but if you want to drive traffic from search engines you really need to move away from a frame based page layout.

There are various ways of achieving that depending on what you feel comfortable with, but be wary of methods that rely on clumsy javascript since that may also cause problems for robots and web-crawlers.

I am sure you know much more about cameras than I do and have had first hand knowledge of Pentax for significantly longer. With the further proviso that I have never done any comprehensive or even systematic analysis on the company or industry, I question your diagnosis that Pentax’s historical problem was excessive debt.

I have no idea whether they entered the medical equipment business organically or through acquisition but this tends to be a stable, fairly high margin business. Only if they acquired and overpaid should it have created any difficulty.

Therefore if a debt service problem in fact existed it seems much more likely to have been caused by poor camera business operating performance, which is consistent with my understanding of the declining market position of the company; from what I gather this started in the early 90s and culminated in their disastrous failure to anticipate the rapid near total substitution of film for digital early this decade.

Without having looked at the complete set of accounts, it seems to me as if the camera business has been unprofitable since the late 90s. In roughly the same period their relative position in the total slr market has gone from a medium volume, high end/high margin supplier to low volume, bottom end/low margin.

As I see it the decline of Pentax is due solely to their spectacular failure to read the market, with any debt issues an effect rather than the cause.

I am also sceptical of your contention regarding Pentax’s cost structure. Clearly Vietnam is superficially low cost but there is more than ample anecdotal evidence of poor quality control, which must be costing them dearly in terms of fulfilling warranty claims in predominantly high cost end markets.

And without knowing much about Vietnam or indeed the lens production process specifically, I have more than enough experience of frontier market manufacturing capacity elsewhere to realise these types of quality control issues are by no means easily fixable. For example I have worked with engineering firms making something as basic as steel structures with relatively wide tolerances in China, that spent years trying and failing to get quality control right.

It is also noteworthy that problems appear to be getting worse, with the latest 16-50 model quite clearly suffering unacceptably high levels of returns. I think you might also ask Samsung why they appear to source lenses elsewhere.

Admittedly widespread adverse publicity regarding quality may be creating a negative feedback loop where greater warranty claims result in a greater defect detection rates relative to alternative suppliers. However, this dynamic must itself be seriously undermining the softer perceived quality benefits of the Pentax brand you mention.

I don’t recall precisely where I read this but I am sure Hoya have publically stated that the business plan target for cameras is a return to profitability around the end of their March financial year, I believe either Q4 or /Q1. Assuming the latter - and the relatively safe bet that market deterioration will cause a slip in financial performance -gives a timeframe of early August for Hoya management to decide whether the loss of face is greater exiting the business or backtracking on what is in effect a stop-loss operating target.

Critical,

I am reluctant to respond to your last post since I feel the discussion is veering off topic but I can not let this slide:

As with any generalisation there is some truth in this, but in relation to the specific Hoya/Pentax relationship under discussion your line of argument is - in the kindest possible terms - completely unsustainable.

In order for it to be valid you would need to show some degree of contra-cyclicality between the camera business and the rest of Hoya, which is substantially semiconductor equipment measured in operating returns. Good luck with that; in fact the only hedging going on there is the Texas variety.

Separately I must say I find it more than a little bizarre that you tar the consulting profession with one brush while appearing to serve up sell-side analyst ratings as some kind of prophetic utterance.

Look, I have no interest whatsoever in seeing Pentax fail - in fact quite the contrary - but I think their current situation is objectively summarised as follows:
* Chronically loss-making
* Lousy competitive position
* Now collapsing end market

You don’t have to be a partner at Bain to realise they are in deep, deep trouble; no responsible management team would ever acquire what is quite obviously a business in need of a turnaround without setting hard targets, and achieving those in the current market climate is undoubtedly going to be much harder than originally anticipated, going on impossible.

Hoya now have the choice of relaxing those targets or cutting their losses, and I believe which way they go will depend on the perceived attractiveness of new product development. However, if you read through Hoya’s results they already appear to have taken substantial write-offs as well as sacked a load of people in Japan, which are the kind of steps you would need to take to clear the way for a disposal. . . or closure.

Sorry to resurrect this thread but I now have a bit of spare time and still need to sort out my backup situation previously discussed here in some detail.

My original Raid 10 idea has pretty much been mentally binned, since as Pete said it is just too many disks to have spinning at once, but I still want to implement something with near bullet proof redundancy.

I have instead given more thought to Pete’s idea of a having an external drive running off an existing internal SATA socket. I quite like this and certainly have at least one spare socket but am concerned that you couldn’t switch off the external unit in isolation without developing system instability (eg a drive suddenly disappears and the OS hangs). Pete, do you have any insight into whether that is possible?

In any case I am increasingly drawn towards something along the following lines: http://www.amazon.co.uk/EdgeStore-DAS501T-Bay-eSATA-Enclosure/dp/B001H54JX6/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1234818683&sr=1-2

This offers far more storage potential than I will need for the foreseeable future. However, my idea would be to populate it with say 2x 1Tb disks (any model suggestions?) that I would effectively mirror at least weekly with a scheduled incremental data backup, and then physically evacuate (perhaps in a caddy) when travelling for off site backup. Does this sound insane or sensible?

FWIW, my basic requirement is to do nightly/as required back ups of a MySQL database of around 7Gb (spread over only a few files that are all updated daily) and ideally also my Outlook .pst file presently weighing in at just under 3Gb in 5 minutes or less.

Any comments or alternative suggestions gratefully appreciated.

I agree with your last sentence completely. However, Canon’s non-camera product portfolio is largely related, with significant synergies in design, production, sales, marketing & distribution, and aftermarket between photocopiers, printers, fax machines, etc. In industry terms it is all office equipment.

In comparison Hoya’s much smaller sales (1/8 x Cannon) cover a vertical industry ‘focus’ including:
* Semiconductor Equipment: Photomasks
* Industrial Equipment/Instrumentation: Photonics
* Computer Equipment/Storage: Hard disk components
* Medical Equipment: Endoscopes
* Medical Supplies: Spectacle lenses, lenses for the treatment of cataracts
* Specialty Retail: Contact lenses

** Consumer Electronics: Pentax Cameras & accessories

There was a long period in the early 1990s when large parts of the Financial PR industry was continuously engaged in brainstorming luncheons on behalf of conglomerate clients demanding some kind of unifying concept that would make a sprawling assortment of disparate portfolio businesses appear coherent and judiciously assembled.

In that spirit it is semantically correct to say that Hoya’s businesses all involve the use of specialty glass but so do space shuttles and double glazing, and there’s about as much industrial logic combining those two under common management as there is in Hoya’s portfolio.

As for their profitability this stems largely from a strong position in Photomasks. However, in reporting quarterly results last week leading chip equipment maker Applied Materials announced demand had fallen off a cliff and “. . .semiconductor customers say that the fall-off in chip demand and pricing is the most severe they have ever experienced. Losses are mounting almost universally".

Much has changed in the corporate world in Japan in the last few years (eg an Anglo-American CEO of Sony) and I have no doubt that Hoya will be under heavy pressure from shareholders to focus on core profitability/do something restructuring related. Disposing of the camera business could be an easy option in more ways than one.

BTW, it is true that Nikon is also small with a somewhat sprawling portfolio but as the #1 in cameras they are obviously not going to exit that business.