Pentax Reasserts Commitment to SLRs Over Mirrorless in New ‘Brand Vision’
Agree or disagree, you have to admire Ricoh/Pentax’ stubbornness. As every other company focuses all of their resources on mirrorless cameras, Pentax has just launched a website and multiple videos reasserting the brand’s commitment to “the future of SLR photography.”
Short of Ricoh coming out and saying that they don’t believe in mirrorless, the message from the company couldn’t be clearer. It’s right there in the tagline at the top of the new Pentax Brand Vision landing page: “Pentax Believes in the Future of SLR Photography.”
“When you take a picture with a single lens reflex (SLR) camera, the light passes through the lens, and in turn the optical viewfinder. You view the image directly with your eyes, and feel it with your heart,” reads the website. “This is the unique experience you get when using an SLR.”
This lofty statement and the ones that follow it were released alongside a set of five “principles” that “express the philosophy of Pentax.” Essentially the five pillars of the new Pentax brand vision:
- We design new cameras through sheer devotion.
- Our goal is to produce cameras with the power to capture images that allow for direct communication with the subject.
- We design cameras that allow our users to enjoy all the processes involved in taking a picture.
- We pursue a level of quality and performance that can’t be measured by numbers alone.
- We respect and value the photographic experiences of our users and view this as an invaluable asset.
These principles and the new “brand vision” are discussed further in the presentation below, in which President of Ricoh Imaging Shinobu Takahashi explains the philosophy behind the Pentax brand:
Mr. Takahashi continues along the same thread. The first question he’s asked—around the 9:30 mark—is why the emphasis on SLRs. We’ve transcribed his response in full below:
Today we also have mirrorless cameras, of course, so some photographers may prefer them. Others may even believe that mirrorless models are superior to SLRs. There are many arguments over this issue.
At Pentax, we don’t design SLRs or mirrorless cameras based on which is superior or inferior in terms of technology. We believe that everything depends on which type of camera the user prefers because of the way it handles or captures a particular subject.
We design SLRs that allow the photographer to sense and capture the light coming through the SLR-exclusive pentaprism. We’d like to help them create images using all the elements of their creative imagination. From our experience, we know that many users truly enjoy the process in photo taking.
That’s why we work so hard to produce high-quality SLR cameras for people who want this.
Again, agree or disagree, this explains Pentax’ dedication to SLRs to the exclusion of mirrorless, at least for the foreseeable future. It also explains why the last Pentax livestream focused almost exclusively on the advances to the Optical Viewfinder in their upcoming APS-C DSLR, which they’ll be showing off in another presentation on July 22nd.
If you want to dive deeper into this new “vision” and the principles that Ricoh has just established for the Pentax brand, check out the full interview above, or visit the new Pentax Brand Vision landing page.
