that for all intents and purposes, only Sony and Canon will be real players
in the digital camera market in 2 years. Then you say, "Japanese analysts think that
Pentax can remain an important niche player in the DSLR and digital medium
format camera market" How does an important niche player differ from a real player?
On Feb 18, 2004, at 9:03 PM, Herb Chong wrote:
financial analysts in Japan have an interesting take on this. they believe
that for all intents and purposes, only Sony and Canon will be real players
in the digital camera market in 2 years. everyone else will be marginalized
with Nikon losing the most since they started at number 2 at the beginning
of the digital camera dash. they never considered Pentax to be in the
running at all as a mass market digital camera vendor. Pentax has recently
revised its 2004 forecast from 1.6 million to 1.4 million digital cameras
sold worldwide. what is interesting is that Japanese analysts think that
Pentax can remain an important niche player in the DSLR and digital medium
format camera market. so far as the analysts are concerned, it's only a
matter of time before film cameras become irrelevant to the bottom line of
the major Japanese camera vendors.
Herb... ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Desjardins" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, February 18, 2004 9:12 AM Subject: Re: is the MZ-S the "FA ltd" camera?
I think that Pentax's limited R&D budget will be spent on DSLRs and any
film camera that can be derived from them. I suspect that you simply
shift the nature of your manufacturing from primarily mechanical
products to primarily electronic ones. Leica has decided to stick with
mechanical but this is a very limited market and its not obvious that
Pentax could justify it financially, especially when they are going to
be cutting it close trying to compete with DSLRs. I guess Pentax could
subcontract out a mechanical design, but it would be a collector kind of
affair and VERY expensive.
