Development Stories of the K-7

It's official but interesting. Look!

http://www.camera-pentax.jp/story/




Some key points as mentioned:-

1. The K-7 is the result of all the latest R&D efforts of Pentax and Genes.

2. The K-7 is designed to be operational under cold temperature of -10 deg. C. (Well, we all know..)

3. The interviewee is Mr. 濱村壽宏, the Designer of the Development Team of the Pentax Imaging Division of the Hoya Corporation.

4. One of the main target was to make a body to match well with the Limited lenses.

5. The K20D is just too large, we wanted to make back an *ist D sized camera.

6. To not make a curved camera body further, but a classical look one with more straight line.

7. A lot of CAD (Computer Aided Design) resources have been utilised during the development.

8. They spent quite some efforts to make the built-in flash far less protruding and can be raised higher.

9. In order to test the weight balance and feel of the new body, various mock-up units were produced.

10. They invited also novices to try and test the mock-ups! Just because novices have no prejudges! (Well, brilliant!)

11. They created the K-7 with the pride of the most famous and successful Pentax bodies in mind, like the LX and MZ-S. A new brand/product image is intended to be re-established with the K-7.

12. The minimization of the K-7 body is done to an extreme and it is achieved to be very small actually.

13. The lines/shape of the Pentaprism part of the K-7 is intentionally made in a way to preamp the Pentaxprism, which is 100% field of view.

14. The body fittness / ergonomics and comfortability of the K-7 was further fine tuned with various clay mock-up models and the gripped hand positions were recorded for reference.

15. So did the position, shape and size of buttons, dials and levels, which were all very carefully designed.

16. Dials are now covered with sturdy rubber so as to further improve comfortability and reliability for operation.

My translations may not be exact and please excuse for the poor translation and I hope you can get the meanings contained! :-)

Update (6-17): I've found a full translation (almost) by a Swedish poster who stays at Japan.
Here it is:-

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1036&message=32149442

I hope this would be more complete in sense for the whole story.

Update (9-24): The above Japanese page has been updated and is now split into three stories and subpages:-

http://www.camera-pentax.jp/k-7/story/index1.html

http://www.camera-pentax.jp/k-7/story/index2.html

http://www.camera-pentax.jp/k-7/story/index3.html

Remarks: Note that the original story and link above should now be the first story ("index1"), although it automatically (wrongly) links to the third story ("index3"). And, the links of the original pictures linked above are now invalid and thus I have updated the picture links accordingly. The headline of my this blog entry is also updated, from "story" to "stories".

And, the OK1000 Pentax Blog (which is now getting almost semi-official) has got the official translations from Pentax (Imaging, USA?) and has published also the first two stories up till now:-

http://www.ok1000pentax.com/2009/09/pentax-k-7-designers-notes-toshihiro.html

http://www.ok1000pentax.com/2009/09/pentax-k-7-designers-notes-takeharu.html

I expect the translation for the third article to come at the OK1000 very soon and you may wish to re-visit the site later on if you are interested.

Btw, I don't feel good for yet another used-to-be (long time ago) totally non-Pentax affiliated (as it is claimed) site going semi-official and now has very close relationship with Pentax (Imaging) again, which I think may not be a good thing (when most of the larger Pentax blogs are now semi-official). Indeed, when you read information from a website which has close to very close relationship with a commercial sector, I think you should note about that fact and think more about their stance, my humble opinion.