Pentax abandons medium format camera

see headline article at http://www.nni.nikkei.co.jp/. (this is a pay-subscription service.) Here is the text:

Thursday, May 10, 2007 3:20 a.m. (JST)

Pentax To Sell Tokyo HQ, Quit Low-Profit Ops To Lift Corp Value

TOKYO (Nikkei)--Pentax Corp. (7750) plans to sell its Tokyo headquarters and withdraw from less profitable businesses under strategies the camera maker has crafted to block a takeover bid by optical glass manufacturer Hoya Corp. (7741), The Nikkei learned Wednesday.

the text of the article includes this statement -

"On top of this, Pentax will continue to overhaul less profitable businesses. It will abandon the development of medium-format single-lens reflex cameras designed for professional photographers and specialize in digital SLR offerings for new and intermediate users."

This is quite unfortunate.

So James,

Amazingly, an optical glass MFR destroys such a venerable companies opportunities in MF. This has been something we all waited for. I wish someone capable buys the rights!

This makes the Kodak-Leaf-Rollei-Sinar Hy6 the hope of us all unless Mamiya can be real in the USA.

I have had a lot of hopes for Pentx.

Still, the Pentax company has apparently promised to keep the DSLR's going.

This is sad.

I still believe that the DSLRs are important if they can still make them.

Asher

The Hoya deal fell through, a while back already.

Ben Rubinstein said:

The Hoya deal fell through, a while back already.

Click to expand...

Yes, but Hoya is still trying to take over Pentax and Pentax is trying to do stop them. Note that this annoucement was made as of May 10th (officially, today).

*Fujifilm (had a back for sale only in japan)
*Mamiya
*kodak
*Pentax

This would be the No.4 failed digital back, and Mamiya almost went down -- If it has not --. It looks more dangerous business than being a working photographer.

Asher: probably your cheapest way is Mamiya/P1

Pentax did this before. Remember their professional DSLR announced back in around 2000 that was promised to be a "ground-breaking" camera? That got abandoned as well in favour of making small digicams instead, but eventually they got back into DSLR's when it became cheaper to make them. I wouldn't be surprised if they get back into MF when that gets cheaper as well. You can never really believe what Pentax say, I think because they generally don't know what they are going to do themselves.

Reading the Pentax press release it's possible to interpret it in a different way. - Pentax have abandoned medium format (film) cameras in order to specialise in digital SLRs. These digital SLRs could include medium format.

Maybe wishful thinking on my part but the release is not 100% clear that they have abandoned the idea of the 645 digital.

if you checkout the latest issue(June) of Photoshop User there is mention of a possible 31megapixel MF camera from Pentax.