It’s a relief they haven’t selected the appellation ‘Dual-mode Interchangeable-lens Camera K-model’

If there's no viewfinder then for that reason only I'm out.

I don’t wish to flog a dead horse here, but the issue clearly is that Sony’s last generation A55 & A33 SLT cameras are not being counted as dslrs - and rightly so!

That's the best joke I've seen from you so far, jaspers

The products aren’t the problem for Pentax, which have largely been critically acclaimed and award winning (recently increasingly dodgy quality control notwithstanding).

The fundamental problem has been crap marketing - exemplified by the original disastrous failure to enter the dslr market in a timely manner - and the overriding priority to ensure the medium term survival of the company is to fix this.

I had high hopes for an improvement under Ricoh’s stewardship believing things couldn’t have got any worse, but incredibly the announcement of product discontinuation without replacements and the jawdropping naming of the new organisation PRIC suggest that incompetence in this department is somehow contagious.

This is interesting:

As I understand it the A55 uses the same sensor as the K5, which suggests to me that both cameras are being phased out because the specific sensor is being discontinued.

Phew!

Your conclusion is wrong because that is just not how mergers and takeovers work.

In a friendly takeover an operating plan for the acquired company is fine-tuned during the negotiations based on conversations with management, accounting due diligence, etc. That is a key part of the process of figuring out how much the business and any resulting synergies are worth, and by extension your potential returns.

Furthermore, although very little information was released regarding the terms of the Pentax acquisition it seemed there was a firm formula for calculating the price based on audited accounts and critically no subjects or conditions to the agreement.

The last point is key, because no self-respecting company, would *ever* negotiate a deal with a fixed price formula, and then leave it in the hands of the old management for 6 months to mismanage. They would require day to day control otherwise the whole thing would be a complete non-starter.

Unless it is not a strategic acquisition but more a break-up exercise with plenty of downside protection on the price; I think that is probably still unlikely but the apparent mass liquidation of the lens stocks via Amazon/Jessops promotions is giving me second thoughts.

The fundamental problem is that Apple networking doesn’t talk nicely to windows networking. But some kind of external network attached storage would probably sort out the translation for you.

I would, however, warn you to stay away from iTunes; on windows it easily qualifies as crapware and borders on malware, with the notorious Bonjour “service” the worst culprit for screwing up windows functionality.

Dropbox on the other hand is a good alternative and should sync over you network.

Sauce: Photo Rumors

But John, there is no mirror "system" in the new Sony “SLT” cameras such as the A77, A65 and before that the A55.

The single non-mirror mirror present directs light solely to the autofocus subsystem. Everything projected in the EVF comes from light passing through to the sensor and as such these bodies meet the test you set up defining a ‘CSC’. See http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/sonyslta55/page2.asp

These cameras are certainly not dslrs according to any technical definition, despite the superficial resemblance (except for the shorter height caused by the missing pentaprism) but nevertheless take pictures of comparable quality.

And this is the decisive point; other designs may deviate much more radically from the conventional d/slr body shape but still take pictures of comparable quality offering a similar degree of control over the exposure. Furthermore, other designs may offer additional benefits, such as size or the apparent absence of the jell-o effect in videos shot with the Sony SLTs.

It seems to me that pros such as Don and Lemmy get it. They are interested in results, not the particular piece of technology that happens to facilitate these. Indeed I would argue it is a hallmark of the amateur mentality to always focus narrowly on the equipment rather than the results.