Well this is a surprise:

A reliable source reported on Pentax Forum that the

‘Pentax ownership belongs to HOYA, the right to use belongs to Ricoh, and the lease contract expires in 2020. Maybe this is why Ricoh does not continue to develop Pentax.’

It would be a serious surprise if Ricoh couldn’t use the Pentax brand name from 2020 towards. I hope Ricoh will still manage to extend the terms of use!

In case you misssed this: Adobe changed his mind and now lists the $9,99 monthly plan on their subscription page (Click here). Well they seem to have realized they were getting to much negative feedback on this!

Imaging Resource interviewed a group of Ricoh managers. Here is some of the things they said:

1) Ricohx will continue the 645 medium format line and doesn’t plan to make a mirrorless medium format camera

2) Ricoh has no plan to launch a new mirrorless system camera

3) Ricoh also made this somehow unexpected statement:

Currently, mirrorless is a newcomer, so of course many users are very interested in the new systems, they want to use [them]. But after one or two years, some users who changed their system from DSLR to mirrorless come back to the DSLR again.
So the DSLR market is currently decreasing a little bit, but one year or two years or three years later, it will [begin] getting higher.

I really cannot believe this is true :)

Today the Japanese Camera Press Club announced the Camera GP 2019 Award winners.

Grand Prize:
1st place and winner: Panasonic S1R
2nd place: Nikon Z7
3rd place: Olympus E-M1X

Lens Award:
1st place and winner: Sony 24mm GM
2nd place: Tamron 28-75mm FE
3rd place: Canon 28-70mm f/2.0 R

Best camera selected by the press readers:
Winner: Olympus E-M1X

Best camera and lens selected by the press club member readers:
Camera: Ricoh GRIII
Lens: Tamron 28-75mm FE

There are the new announcements of the week:

Panasonic:
Panasonic has an entire well paid division working hard to fool their potential customers. That’s why the G90 is also named G95, G99 or G91 depending on the region were you live. They seem to ignore that people all over the world read news and reviews written from all over the world. So we would be all better of having ONE name.
This week they are proud their next messy name: The GX880! In Japan the same camera is named GF10. Now we can’t wait to see what name they will choose when they announce the US version! I hope it’s GA579X0F4!

Samyang:
Samyang has announced the new 45mm f/1.8 FE. But watch out! I guess some of the former Panasonic folks now work at Samyang. That’s why the lens is branded as “Rokinon” in the US and “Bower” in some EU countries. Still, they can’t match the genius from Panasonic. So please work harder Samyang and give us some extra brand names!

You can preorder the lens now at BHphoto, FocusCamera or Adorama.

7Artisan:
And finally 7Artisan announced the new 50mm f/1.8 APS-C lens for mirrorless system cameras. In this case the name of the lens is the same worldwide. Shoten is the name of the company behind this lens and funny enough they have multiple brand names: Meike, IBE optics, Zhong Yi, 7Artisans. And as far as I know some of their lenses also got rebranded with 125 different names too.

7Artisans in Stock here:
In the USA at Amazon, Bhphoto and Adorama.
In Europe at Amazon DE, Amazon UK, Amazon FR, Amazon IT, Amazon ES.

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So that’s it for today! If Panasonic needs me they can call me at 1232432843257GGF210CX for any help on finding new camera names!