Pentax Life

Ken Takeshita have translated recent interview with Hisashi Tatamiya, Pentax Chief Engineer. Many words have been spoken already in the previous interviews but there is still something interesting. First of all Mr. Tatamiya describes situation with the unexpected K10D popularity:

We thought it was going to be popular, but not as popular as K100D, because K10D was still a sub $1,000 camera. However, although we cannot give you any specific figures, we were overwhelmed by far more than twice the pre-booking order qty of k100D. For example, a big chain store who pre-booked 300 units of K100D now gave us a pre-booking order of over 1,000 units. This is just in Japan but the market reaction in overseas market is much larger than that… …in Europe, it (Pentax brand) was not particularly well recognized. However, the pre-release reception was excellent, and in certain country, Order of 1,000 units came in when we forecasted 50 units initial order based on the history there.

The second part of the interview dedicated to reorganizations inside the Pentax team and the history of the new K10D specific features like sensitivity priority mode, RAW button and weatherproofing.

Pentax’s development staff all love cameras and photography and these engineers have been constantly suggesting a number of innovative features. But they were not particularly well adopted into new products in the past. However, aforementioned organizational change enabled those development staff having frequent discussions directly with core staff of product planning and marketing, which in turn encouraged submission of new ideas.