LAS VEGAS — You may be familiar with the brand Ricoh, especially if you work in an office with giant, beige copy machines. But the company began branching into consumer products a few years ago after acquiring Pentax, the camera company, in 2011.
While Ricoh is headquartered in Japan, its U.S. imaging unit, called Ricoh Imaging, is right in downtown Denver, having moved to 17th and California after picking up Pentax, which was at the time based in Golden. It employs about 30 people in Colorado.
It’s been a bumpy road, admitted Jim Malcolm, president of Ricoh Imaging. Pentax transitioned slowly from film to digital. And while it always offered digital cameras like its competitors, those new products came out about six months after everyone.
“Pentax played catchup all the time. But we never had to apologize,” because the delay helped work the kinks out of the products, he said Tuesday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. “Pentax has a lot of value as a brand. Converting it to a product was the challenge.”
But Ricoh may finally be on to something.
At the end of 2014, Ricoh Imaging launched its new products, including the KS-1, which is aimed at millennials who want to take their smartphone photos to a new level. It also added a new sporty camera called the WG-M1, a squarish, waterproof camera with a screen that can be mounted.
And to really go after the younger market, it launched the Theta, which looks like remote control with a mysterious eye on both sides.
The camera lens captures photos from 360 degrees. So if you hold it up and push the button, you will have taken a photo as far as the camera can see in every direction. No more cramming all your friends into a selfie.
It then stitches the two sides together so when you see the entire image, the camera is actually not in the photo because it couldn’t take a photo of itself. Using the Theta mobile app, you can use your finger to see the whole image and tweak it to just show a portion. The link is sharable on Facebook and other social networking sites.
“We wanted to deliver something unexpected,” Malcolm said.
