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The reference to Leica was tongue-in-cheek (hence the wink smilie) but, seriously, I am not sure that many enthusiasts with £1,000+ to spend on a camera body would do so in Jessops (I may be wrong). However, you are absolutley right in that those moving to DSLRs from compacts are not likely to take the Pentax route if Pentax compacts are not available on the high street.
Pentax missed their big opportunity when a lot of SLR film camera users were moving to digital. Canikon, and even Sony/Minolta, grasped the opportunity and got customers buying into their systems. Pentax was caught napping and, as you say, most enthusiasts (and pros) are now already locked into systems that are too costly to abandon. I'd really like to see Pentax where they were in the 60s and 70s but the odds are against them - even if they had products that knocked spots off the competition and they tripled their advertising budget to raise their profile.
I can see there being a lot of pressure inside Pentax to move to Micro System Cameras but then they'd be up against competitors with vastly more financial clout. On the other hand, specialising in large format digital camers would probably not be a viable business. What a dilemma.
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