Pentax and Nikon and Leica...they went the same way on lens mounting, focusing direction, shutter speed changing, well over 50 years ago. Pentax in actual operation is a lot like Nikon. Pentax has always made really great cameras in the hand...the ergonomics and the "feel" on Pentax cameras has been very much targeted at actual "shooters". Decades ago, with the Spotmatic, Pentax utterly NAILED the kind of ergonomic simplicity and minimalist design that took decades to become common. For example, when Pentax was taking the European professional market by storm, Nikon was offering up the hugely clunky, bulky, and anti-ergonomic F with the Photomic FT and then FTn and finally the FTN metering prisms....OMG...and Canon had the clunkiest, ugliest POS junker camera designs you can imagine...meanwhile, Pentax had elegant, simple designs that would not be seen until Apple started making things like the Mac Mini and the iPhone.
Later, the Pentax LX versus the Nikon F3 and Canon F1-N...no contest as to which was the BEST design by farrrrrr, with an electronically timed shutter AND a redundant mechanically-timed system as well, water sealing gaskets, and so on....the Pentax LX was an amazing system camera...but it went nowhere. A few years later, the Pentax Super Program versus the Canon A-1, the first 5-mode 35mm SLR. The Canon A-1 was an **amazing** camera breakthrough, and a hugely, hugely disappointing sales flop. The Super Program was hailed as the best enthusiast camera from any maker, and the economy sibling, the Program PLus was nice too, but nowhere near the tour de force that the Super Program was. The Super Program/Program Plus era was the high water mark for Pentax, sales-wise.
It's weird...Leica was once the undisputed KING of 35mm, from 1930 until 1959, when the Nikon F came out. But the thing was, in the EARLY 1950's Nikon invented the electric motor drive, when Leica still used KNOB-wind advance; Korean war journalists who came back with Nikon cameras and lenses established the "Nikkor" lens as the new standard for "wiry-sharp" images; the F in 1959 started the fast decline of the 35mm rangefinder. Canon hired Nippon Kogaku to build the lenses fore ALL of the new Canon rangefinders; Canon hewed to the rangefinder model for too long after Nikon's F SLR hit; by the time Canon had a "system" SLR, they just copied Nikon and called theirs the Canon F-1...copying Nikon's F...Nikon went F-2....Canon countered with the F1-n. Nikon 25 years later invented the first affordable D-SLR, the Nikon D1....canon needed about four, five years to counter with a pro d-slr, the Canon 1D....see the name-game at work?
In the overall scheme of things, a LOT of camera brands died out...or were sold and re-sold, and so on. Ricoh, Minolta, Konica,Petri, Exakta, Yashica/Contax, basically, all DEAD brands. Pentax has been sold twice within the last decade, and is barely clinging to life, but apparently has loyalty in Japan as a venerable brand. It's weird, but the majority of 1960's to 1980's camera brands could NOT SURVIVE, even with fabulous offerings and really nice cameras and lenses. When autofocus hit around 1987, Canon and Minolta both had excellent initial offerings, but by the time digital cameras were emerging, Minolta spent zillions on the failed APS-C film endeavor AND lost a huge patent infringement case, and those were mortal wounds; Minolta's first d-slr was stillborn; Pentax waited YEARS to make a d-slr, and by then, it was too late. Nikon had been partnering with FujiFilm and Kodak to make early d-slr cameras, but the prices were in the $25,000-$30,000 range; the 1998 Nikon D1 at $5,998 KILLED Kodak's hybrid DCS 460 business. Canon had...NOTHING, nothing at all for a few years, then they hit with the Canon D30, a 3-MP consumer d-slr for $3,000, up against the Nikon D1 and D1h at basically twice the cost. At that point, everybody but Canon and Nikon was walking dead in the d-slr market. When Canon got the first sub-$1,000 d-slr on the market with the original Digital Rebel, the entire d-slr market exploded with new sales. Nikon introduced their sub-$1,000 offering, the D70. So, within about a six year span, ALL the competitors that used to be in the biz were reduced to....near ashes. Kodak AND Contax made Full-Frame d-slr's well before Canon ever did, and way before Nikon did, but those things died out very early. Contax made one model, Kodak made the DCS 760 6-MP on the Nikon F5 body, then the Kodak 14n, the 13.8 megapixel built on the N-80 body. FujiFilm made the S1,S2,S3, and S5 Pro d-slr models, allll on Nikon bodies. And yet, the only two companies to emerge winners were Coke and Pepsi...
Coke, Pepsi. RC Cola (under new management). Dr. Pepper.
Kodak=Tab. Contax/Yashica = Jolt Cola. Alllll gone!