It seems that Pentax cut back production on primes because there was a period in which that lack of interest caused poor sales, they put their production money into zoom lenses that were selling better and invested more into the DSLR development work.
The *ist D model sold relatively slowly, but I suspect that was primarily a price-point issue. When the DS model was released at a more acceptable price point, all of a sudden the demand for high quality primes bounced up to dramatically greater than it had been for a while which stressed the availability of a lot of lenses until they ramped production back up to compensate for it. That's my conjecture anyway. :-) Godfrey On Jun 28, 2006, at 10:57 AM, Aaron Reynolds wrote: > I really don't understand the "shortage" -- when I purchased the F > version new in March, no one had even inquired about the > availability of 50mm primes from Pentax Canada in almost five years. > > If it was a "shortage", it was caused by retailers refusing to > stock or special-order the lens. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
