K200D Discontinued

The K200D has been put into the list of discontinued DSLRs at Pentax Japanese home website:-

http://www.pentax.jp/english/imaging/digital/slr/others.html (English page)

http://www.pentax.jp/japan/imaging/digital/slr/others.html (Japanese page)

Since the K200D was put onto the market in fall February 2008 (see this announcement), the product life of it is only 9 months.

Recently, the K200D has been sold damn cheap, at around HK$4,000 (US$500) for the single lens kit set (with the DA 18-55 II) and less than $3,600 (US$450) for the body alone, which is even cheaper than the K-m which is placed lower in the Pentax camp.

Indeed, I did predict on day one that the K200D would not be a success, owing to the marketing shortsightednesses of Pentax (and actually Hoya), all which I had talked about and analyzed for why, much earlier here. Actually, it has been proven that the K200D is undoubtedly just a market failure and with such a very short product lifetime. In contrast, the elder Nikon D60 and Canon 450D are still here and they are still selling like hot cakes, aren't they? Why? Well, this market failure did not have no trace, just look at what I reported in July about an Internet Poll which showed that the K200D was the least popular or just the least wanted entry level DSLR body, and that did verify once again that the K200D was just a fault and mistake of Pentax/Hoya in the very beginning.

Frankly, Pentax/Hoya should not have wasted their efforts, money and time in making such a K200D (the basic "logics" behind are mostly faulty, I would say again, who wanted a bulky and heavy but weather sealed body at an initially higher than average "entry level" price but without a matching weather sealed "entry level" priced *kit* lens?? Amazing and unbelieveable market positioning and rationales??). What I firmly believe is that they *should* have created, produced and marketed a K-m alike DSLR back to February this year (or actually should be even earlier). Now, fortunately, they have still made the K-m, but unfortunately I am afraid that it is just a bit too late and the most worrisome thing is that the K-m has no updated features as it should have, especially for what it is targeted at those DSLR beginners who mostly have just used a P&S or a prosumer DC, say, the LiveView and those associated *standard* features like Live Histogram and Face Detection and so on.

Anyway, to look at the bright side, anyone and I could *imagine* that there will be a K300 coming soon which is about to replace the K200D (I guess Pentax have opted to drop the "D" letter from now on, as the K2000 is actually not named as the K2000D - there is no "D", against what quite some people still mis-spell and/or mis-type it). However, objectively thinking, I bet the K300 would not happen in the near future. It is because it is just not something that is desirable by Pentax/Hoya to keep more DSLR models in production as it would incur more production costs, business risks and other financial burdens. The reality is just that there is already not much market share left for Pentax to support their current products. In this case, they could be just much happier to group all the existing limited and tiny groups of purchasers for both the K-m and the K200D rather than to split them into two!

Well, it also recalls me of the last Pentax high-ranked official's funny and unrealistic speech of a "lower class entry level DSLR" (the K-m) and an "upper class entry level DSLR" (the K200D)!? And, his September claim of three hierachies of DSLRs has now vanished?

Finally, now if the exposure accuracy of the K-m is really debugged somehow and be better (as it seems to be so far - read my recent blog entries for those preliminary findings) than that of the K20D (which still looks problematic in this department, just like what all other previous Pentax DSLRs have been found to be, no matter from what many different Pentax DSLR users (mostly new) have reported (do searches at Google and other Pentax forums for those) or just look at my this simple and direct analysis), *should* the K20D be also discontinued soonest and be replaced by something that up-to-the-standard (of all others)?