On Wed, 01 Mar 2006 11:26:09 -0000, Bob Shell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Feb 28, 2006, at 6:54 PM, Rob Studdert wrote:
You are not feeling especially smart, either.
I recall that Pentax was pretty blunt about the FF camera not being
marketable due to sensor issues.
So you are telling me that they didn't know this or it wasn't an issue
when it
was shown to the market?
Actually, they didn't. I saw the prototype at photokina and talked to
some of the Pentax people about it. They were very enthusiastic. But
at that time they did not know that Philips, the maker of the full frame
chip, would miss delivery deadlines by over a year and jack the price up
several times prior to delivery. Kyocera went ahead with the N Digital
using that chip, and you see where it got them! Pentax people I talked
to at various times during the project were very up front with me about
what was going on, and when Philips raised the price one last time they
told me they were killing the project because the new chip price would
push the price of the camera out of the range they considered
practical. The Contax N Digital was nearly two years late to dealers,
sold poorly and performed even more poorly due to chip and firmware
problems, both of which Kyocera blamed on Philips. I believe it was the
disaster with this chip that caused Philips to decide to withdraw from
that market and sell off their chip fabrication assets, which are now an
independent company called Dalsa.
If I were in your shoes, Rob, I'd direct my anger where it belongs, at
Philips. They promised Pentax something they were unable to provide at
the quoted original price and in the quoted time frame. Pentax lost a
lot of money on that project. If Philips had come through with what
they originally promised it would have been a killer camera. But if
they hadn't dropped the project it might just have killed Pentax, as it
did Contax.
Quite so. That fiasco put Pentax back by about five years. By next year
they should have a good digital line-up, but it's cost them dear. I also
suspect that Pentax management hs been starving the Imaging Division of
funding in the meantime. Corporate minds work in funny ways, and I have
seen companies where a division has been "punished" for some real or
imagined fault. Of course, all it does is hurt the company overall.
John
--
Using Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/m2/
