Pentax 8.5 x 21 Papilio

No: 116867

On August 6, 2007, Japanese optical glass-maker Hoya Corporation completed a friendly public tender offer for Pentax and acquired 90.59% of the company.

On August 14, 2007, the company became a consolidated subsidiary of Hoya.

On October 29, 2007, Hoya and Pentax announced that Pentax would merge with and into Hoya effective on March 31, 2008. Hoya closed the Pentax-owned factory in Tokyo, and moved most of their operations to Southeast Asia. All professional (DA*) and consumer (DA, D-FA) lenses are produced in Vietnam, whereas DSLR cameras are produced in Philippines.

On July 29, 2011, Hoya transferred its Pentax imaging systems business to a newly established subsidiary called Pentax Imaging Corporation. On October 1, 2011, Ricoh acquired all shares of Pentax Imaging Corp. and renamed the new subsidiary Pentax Ricoh Imaging Company, Ltd.

Hoya will continue to use the Pentax brand name for their medical related products such as endoscopes.

This small bino is a joy for the eye. The Pentax Papilio (which means butterfly in Latin) is a compact, reverse-Porro-prism binocular that doubles as a long-distance microscope. It will focus as close as 50 cm! And it's small and light enough (300 gram) to fit in a coat pocket or a purse.

These Pentax Papilio binoculars focus much closer than any other binocular. With other close-focusing binoculars, as you look closer and closer, the area of overlap between what your two eyes see gets smaller and smaller, until it's barely a sliver. But with the Papilio, you can always see the object with both eyes at once. How do they do that?

As you turn the focus wheel to focus on something close, the two objective lenses automatically move closer together. As the focus distance changes, each eye's line of sight converges with the other's, so that both eyes are always looking at the same thing. The result is that you get a true binocular view of the object.