The latest rumor I received is that Ricoh is planning to enter the mirrorless interchangeable camera market. This is not something that will happen soon – the plan for now is for 2018. The new product line is expected to be aimed at enthusiasts and professionals. A potential collaboration with another camera manufacturer is possible and Fuji was one of the names that was mentioned – both companies may work together on the development on a new larger X mount or something similar. Discussions are still in the early stage and options are still being explored, so take all this with a grain of salt.
In the past few weeks I received two separate emails on this same topic. Unless somebody is playing games, there is a pretty good chance that this may actually happen.
I am still in the process of establishing my Ricoh/Pentax sources for this website. If you have any tips/rumors/news you would like to share, you can contact me anonymously here.