Konica Minolta Leave the Camera Business

John Dvorak has published a story about Konica Minolta leaving the digital camera industry, announced last week, and predicts that, for now, the big companies will survive, but he doesn't expect others, Panasonic, HP, Epson, Pentax to survive.

One thing that seemed to indicate problems for Konica Minolta, was the release of rebadged cameras, such as the Dimage E40, and Dimage E500 (aka Ricoh RR530), where they simply put their name on a camera manufactured by Premier - something Pentax seem to be doing as well:

"It was a shame to see the Konica-Minolta folks fold their tent and sell their designs and assets to Sony, a company that will undoubtedly fail to exploit any of what it bought. Minolta and Konica have a combined experience of over 200 years in the industry and apparently weren't able to get out of the SLR film camera business fast enough. This is despite aggressive attempts to make headway in the digital game, which included the development of some breakthroughs."