Pentax considering Mirrorless 35mm Full Frame and Mirrorless 645 (interview)

UPDATE (Dec-19-2011 10:48pm EST): A photographer in the PentaxForums has translated the interview directly (via Rice High)

ORIGINAL POST: The head of Pentax R&D was talking to the Japanese Impress Japan magazine and during that interview he mentioned that Pentax is considering the possibility of a mirrorless 35mm full frame camera and even a mirrorless 645 camera! Granted, this is the head of R&D talking and these were his personal thoughts, but still, he said it on the record during an interview with an industry publication.

A summary of the interview is posted by this helpful dpreview forum user and in Japanese by This Is Tanaka (computer translated) [page-down, under the picture]

Discussions of this at the dpreview Pentax forum and Rice High and a long discussion at the PentaxForums forums.

We also just mentioned the Olympus interview, so there is actually a method to the madness. These comments came out of an industry roundtable Impress Japan held with eight camera manufacturers writes Rice High. The eight are: Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fuji, Pentax, Ricoh, Olympus, and Shiguma.

If you can read Japanese, the interview is available as a PDF file. Unfortunately neither Google Translate nor Chrome's built-in PDF reader offer computer-translation.

Rice High also notes that this was human-translated from Japanese to Chinese at the Xitek forums which you can read computer-translated. Considering the three-level translations, don't do a victory dance or jump off a bridge based on these interviews ;-)

Speaking of Olympus and Pentax, it is an interesting tale of two cities. A few months ago the roles were reversed. Hoya was looking for a way to get rid of Pentax and seemingly no one wanted Pentax, while Olympus was riding the mirrorless wave with the Micro Four Thirds system.