RiceHigh's Pentax Blog - Two Years

My Blog is two years old today, since it was born on November 26, 2006. During these two years, a lot have happened for Pentax and so do many other things in the DSLR industry. As for my Blog, my editing directions have not been changed, so does my insistence on keeping my site totally Ad free and nothing commercial or simply no money related. Nonetheless, there is one other thing that is changing for my Blog, though: It is the increase in "popularity", well, in terms of the traffic volume.

In fact, my this Blog has been the most "popular" Pentax Blog on the Internet for months already, no matter people like my opinions (or simply me) or not. There have been consistently more than 17,000 page views each month at my Blog, which is just a significant increase than what I saw one year ago.

As for Pentax, I think they still do face a very difficult time right now. Nevertheless, the K-m seems to bring out some new hopes as it seems that Pentax/Hoya have shown at least some determination to debug their DSLRs and upkeep with the competition in performance/accuracy/reliability which they have been lagging behind quite much and for long for many important aspects which include AF performance, AWB and exposure accuracies.

But yet the bad thing is that Pentax have still been unable to update neither the K20D nor the 200D which could now actually be outperformed by the K-m in quite some areas (so could quite some other basic models by the bigger DSLR makers).

Indeed, the K-m does share many of my ideas to make a smaller Pentax DSLR which has a higher performance and reliability and does share my core belief of "Less is More", which I iterated in details here more than half year ago. However, the reality of such a highly effective low cost and basic DSLR will not please the entire or more of the new DSLR beginners, as the K-m does lack the latest and more updated features like a fully functional LiveView feature, Face Detection and/or Movie Recording and so on - so it cannot be a real most updated electronics gadget afterall.

In fact, the dark clouds are still all here over Pentax currently. I bet they simply cannot do much better with the K-m. They do need a true up-market DSLR model and system which is what they still truly lack one, even just for an APS-C system, not even to mention for a technically more advanced 135 Full Frame one, which Pentax (and then Samsung) told us in September that they would not have one (but just back to April and June, they had told something very different). But the *fact* is that as for those 135 Full Frame DSLR bodies, they just all have obvious advantages in Image Quality than those APS-C ones with a smaller sensor format, as once again verified by the DxO lab test results.

So, in the next year of 2009 to come, let's wait and see what Pentax will do to survive and hopefully to create some miracles for coming out of the current very difficult situation they are facing. Of course, all the current facts are still very unfavourable to Pentax, that's why some people like Thom Hogan have even predicted the dismissal of Pentax after 2009, which might be a bit too pessimistic, but yet still somehow possible, especially if Pentax/Hoya won't do better and act/react faster.