Just a couple of thoughts... Mike J. noted that Pentax was moving a ton of Optio digital cameras. Somebody else pointed to a Japanese article last week, calling this time the sweet spot in the market, suggesting that volume was big enough and costs were now low enough to make profits in the category.
Pentax looks pretty good here, if your focus is making money. This is the same Mass Market position Pentax has always aimed for. Did they follow a plan and successfully execute it? Sony, Fuji, Kodak and others have the Mass Market tied up in the USA. They are the ones in the Big Box retail stores, the ones selling electronics and video equipment for Christmas. 2nd thought... A woman at work asked me to recommend a digital camera. I told her where to look, but had 2nd thoughts the next day. She is not computer illiterate, but I wasn't sure how much equipment she has at home. I talked to here about it later in the week. She has 2 young kids under 6. I could see her hard disk going down and here losing the last 5 years of family photos. We all are pretty computer savvy here. We have CD burners to cut our pictures to. We have classy printers and photo programs to manipulate the images and print them. It's a lot of equipment and know-how that goes into having digital images. We both came to the conclusion that what she needed was a new film based point-n-shoot, not a digital camera. It means most of today's digital camera market is computer geeks. That's a surprising thought... Regards, Bob S.
