I do not understand this "gotta have new more better faster more now"
attitude. The rumors and supposedly informed folks have said here and
on every Pentax oriented forum for months that they will have new SLR
products to announce at Photokina 2006, NOT PMA.
Products announced for PMA have been in the pipeline for 7-10 months
at least. Just because they're going to focus on higher end cameras
like SLRs doesn't mean they're going to dump every new product in the
P&S range.
I'm not exasperated with Pentax. I'm exasperated with the knee-jerk
reactions by Pentax users, both here and on the other forums. To me,
the fact that they came out with a very successful *ist D, then
followed it with a very solid and useful *ist DS, DL, DS2 models that
are closely related shows that they have good guts in the design, and
are willing to put in the time and money for a carefully considered
development program.
There is NOTHING wrong with the D or the DS/DL/DS2 bodies. They may
not be the top-end market leaders on features or speed, and they may
not be at the state of the art on resolution anymore, but they are
solid, reliable, consistent, high quality cameras which are
absolutely useful and produce excellent photographs.
Pentax' conservative design and development is very appealing to me,
and is not so very different from Nikon's. Nikon's upgrade for their
D100 body, the D200, took just about as long as the time between
Pentax D introduction and the upcoming D2 rumored to be announced in
the fall. The D100, like the *ist D, was slow, a little feature-
sparse, but produced excellent pictures. And the D200 is a superb,
state of the art body. I see no reason why the D2, with a similar
time in development, will be any less.
Godfrey
