Ricoh did get out of the SLR business during the AF era (to some extent, they actually continued to sell MF film SLR's until recently, but the body was a Cosina) although they did have a longtime presence in the high-end compact side of things with their GR compacts (which are simply awesome). But they're been increasingly involved in selling high-end compacts and mirrorless systems. Buying Pentax gives them back an SLR system in a mount they know intimately and gives them access to the manufacturing capacity and sales structure they've lacked outside asia.
This isn't a repeat of Konica-Minolta. Ricoh's only buying the camera division where Konica wanted only the business imaging side of Minolta and also had been trying to get rid of their own Camera division for decades (despite it being both a major film producer and a producer of rather innovative cameras including the only truly modern M mount body in the Hexar RF). -Adam On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 2:45 AM, P. J. Alling <webstertwenty...@gmail.com> wrote: > Ricoh left the SLR business years ago. I really hate to say this but, this > looks too much Konica buying up Minolta, and we all know how that turned > out. Minolta users were lucky that Sony was looking to enter the DSLR > market. > > If Hoya wasn't big enough to keep Pentax a going concern, how the hell is > Ricoh going to do it? > > On 7/1/2011 1:35 AM, Miserere wrote: >> >> I'm not even joking! >> >> >> http://www.1001noisycameras.com/2011/06/ricoh-buying-pentax-according-to-reuters-japan-sources.html >> >> If true...wow.... >> >> >> —M. >> >> \/\/o/\/\ --> http://WorldOfMiserere.com >> >> http://EnticingTheLight.com >> A Quest for Photographic Enlightenment >> > > > -- > Where's the Kaboom? There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom! > > --Marvin the Martian. > > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > PDML@pdml.net > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and > follow the directions. > -- M. Adam Maas http://www.mawz.ca Explorations of the City Around Us. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
