Hype for a New Pentax DSLR Is High, But Temper Your Expectations

A well-known Pentax leaker with a strong history of being right has said a new Pentax DSLR is coming this year. That’s certainly possible, but based on very recent conversations with company leadership, you should probably temper your expectations.

Asahi Man, a long-time member of the DP Review forums, is a well-regarded source of Pentax information with a pretty high hit rate according to Digi-Came Info. This month, they posted that, “yes, the new one is coming in 26, no speculation,” referring to a new Pentax DSLR.

Pentax has a very slow release cadence. The last Pentax DSLR to hit the market was the K-3 III Monochrome, which debuted in 2023. While PetaPixel‘s Chris Niccolls liked it, the camera may not have seen wide success as it already appears to be out of production.

Before that was the KF in 2022, which was just a re-released K-70. The last full-frame Pentax DSLR came way back in 2018 in the form of the K-1 Mark II.

If Pentax wants to continue to be a digital camera manufacturer, and there is every reason to believe it does, then a new camera this year would be a welcome sight. And while that is certainly possible, given how Pentax-Ricoh spoke about its plans for a new DSLR less than six months ago, it seems unlikely that a brand-new camera would be ready to go so soon.

“Inside of Ricoh, the A-team was developing GR, the B-team was developing new Pentax products. So I combined those teams and asked them to design something for the Pentax brand that is a totally new concept,” Ricoh President Yasutomo Mori told PetaPixel last October.

“When considering the Pentax brand, focusing solely on current customers will not sustain the brand. The engineers are researching and making a strong effort to answer what a DSLR system camera should be which will attract the younger generation. That is the discussion we are having internally.”

That operational consolidation and the task to figure out where to go with the DSLR just happened within the last seven months, right after the launch of the Ricoh GR IV, which dropped in August 2025.

Five months ago, when PetaPixel spoke to company leadership, there still wasn’t a clear answer internally on how to make the DSLR popular among young people; the company clearly says it is a necessary key to sustaining the brand.

It is a possibility that since that conversation in Australia, Ricoh-Pentax has cracked that code and figured out its direction, but developing a camera from scratch takes between two and three years. Just look at the development timeline of the Pentax 17: announced as a project in 2022 and released in the summer of 2024.

If a new camera is coming in 2026, what is more likely than a brand-new design — which is certainly coming at some point in the future — is a re-imagining of a current camera, not dissimilar from what Pentax has done with its last two DSLR releases. If there isn’t a huge amount of development required, the company can absolutely release a DSLR in 2026.

Just don’t expect it to be the camera that Pentax said it was still trying to wrap its head around less than half a year ago.

Image credits: Elements of header photo licensed via Depositphotos.com.