On Thu, Jan 20, 2022 at 05:43:35PM -0800, Larry Colen wrote: > https://petapixel.com/2022/01/20/ricoh-to-stop-mass-producing-cameras-sell-direct-to-consumer-only/ > > As of April 1, 2022 (no fooling) Ricoh will stop selling Pentax and GR > branded cameras through the distribution network and will only sell through > their own website and branded stores.
As best I can tell that announcement was specifically talking about the Japanese market. More than anything else this sounds a lot like the way computers are sold. Sure, I could go to a variety of stores (online or physical) and buy an off-the-shelf computer, but I've hardly ever actually done that (the exception being a couple of ready-built systems I picked up from Tiger Direct at clearance prices). Most of the time I've gone to the manufacturer's web site (Gateway 2000, HP, Dell, ...), configured the system there, and had them ship it to me. While cameras today aren't as configurable as computers have been for the last few decades, there have been some options (a couple of variants of an otherwise identical camera). And as we see every time a new body is rumoured to be forthcoming, we get people posting saying what the camera must have to make it desirable as far as they are concerned. If Ricoh could actually offer a system where a camera body could be configured in a variety of ways (anti-aliasing and/or IR filters, sensor dimensions, pixel count, flip-out screen, screw drive focussing, power zoom, fastest shutter speed, ...) might they be able to do that and still keep the price reasonable? I don't know. -- %(real_name)s Pentax-Discuss Mail List To unsubscribe send an email to pdml-le...@pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
