Bruce quoted, "Pentax and Minolta are on life support. Olympus, although strong now is relying on other manufacturers to produce their products and has little of their own technology or engineering in their cameras, although it is rumored that they will have a new camera with dedicated lenses on the market in the fall. "
from http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0206/editorial.htm I hope Bruce cited this article just as food for thought, because it's too stuffed with factual inaccuracies and questionable logic to be taken seriously on the whole. First of all, the Canon logo which coincidentally appears on their front page (the only camera company to appear there, apart from HP, who powers their site) has nothing to do, I'm sure, with the Canon bias in the article, nor with the dismissive tone accorded to Nikon, Pentax, Minolta, and Olympus. I haven't seen other issues of the magazine, though, so I'll reserve judgement on that. The author quotes a store owner: "There is an enormous opportunity here for a photo manufacturer who can produce a 'kiosk' that will go into camera stores and generate revenue for printing from digital memory cards. Both Olympus and Fuji are already addressing this market." Huh? Where has be been? Those machines have been around for years. Kodak's ubiquitous kiosks have slots for PCMCIA cards, and adapters are widely available to allow digital cards to be used. We've been doing it in our family-owned store for years. Another quote from the article: "Small items such as filters used to be high-profit sales. With digital, you don't need filters any more. You can do it all in photo shop." Spoken like someone who has never worked at the retail level. Even people with digital cameras still want filters. This is probably a learned response from film cameras, but the reasons they give are pretty sound. Some want to protect the front lens element with a UV filter. Others want to use polarizers to remove refletions in windows. Not everything can be done in PhotoShop. You can do a lot of stuff in a traditional darkroom, too, but some people still prefer to do it in-camera. Weird, eh? :) "Meanwhile film prices for those that still use old-fashioned non-digital cameras are swinging erratically. According to Dick Bagdassarian the owner of Pro Photo in Washington, 'professional' films sell at twice the price of 'amateur' films." I'm speechless... are they really this stupid? How is this "swinging erratically"??? Professional films come primarily in 36exp rolls, compared to 24exp for consumer films, and they tend to be better films. 'Round these parts, they've *always* been twice as much as our cheapest amateur film. What are these guys talking about? How does the price difference between professional and amateur film prove that prices are swinging erratically? To prove their point about erratically swinging prices, this is what they say: "For example Kodak's Ektachrome E100S used for outdoor lighting sells for $7.55 per roll, while a roll of Kodak 320, used for indoor lighting sells for $12.00, and a roll of high speed 400 film sells for $14.46. Fuji has similar pricing differences." (1) These are all pro films. (2) The example they give of the doubling price is between ISO 100 and 400 professional films. So not only do they turn out to not be talking about price changes, just price differences, they don't even talk about price differences intelligently. And we're supposed to listen to what they say about retail trends? :) Sorry for venting, but I hate to see misinformation and poorly-researched, poorly-written articles like that. There are too many people out there with intelligent things to have to put up with this. There are some interesting points in the article, and I agree with some of them, but on the whole I don't find myself able to believe much of what they say about the situation. chris - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
