Pentax Medical Brand Guidelines: Asahi Optical’s Endoscope Line, Kept by HOYA Since 2008

A spectacle-lens workshop in Tokyo.

Pentax Medical traces its roots to 1919. English Wikipedia says the company began that November as Asahi Kogaku Goshi Kaisha, a limited partnership founded by Kumao Kajiwara at a shop in Toshima, then a suburb of Tokyo, polishing spectacle lenses. “Asahi” means “rising sun.” Pentax Medical’s own history page gives the same founding year and calls the 1919 partnership the antecedent of today’s business.

The partnership became Asahi Optical Co., Ltd. in 1938. By then, English Wikipedia says, it was also making lenses for still and cine cameras; Japanese Wikipedia dates its first Japanese-made projection lens to 1923. In the years leading up to the Second World War, according to English Wikipedia, Asahi Optical devoted much of its time to military contracts for optical instruments. At the end of the war it was disbanded by the occupying powers and allowed to re-form in 1948, English Wikipedia says; Japanese Wikipedia gives 1946 as the year operations resumed, with the polishing of binocular and camera lenses.

The firm then became a camera maker. Its Asahiflex of 1952 was the first Japanese single-lens reflex for 35mm film, and the Pentax name — first a trademark of East Germany’s VEB Zeiss Ikon, built from “pentaprism” and “Contax” — was acquired in 1957, according to English Wikipedia. Asahi Optical renamed itself Pentax Corporation in 2002.

From bronchoscopes to 4K processors.

Medicine came late in the camera story. Pentax Medical’s history page says the company entered the endoscopy market in 1977 with the FB-17A, its first bronchofiberscope, and set up PENTAX Precision Instrument Corporation in the United States in 1979, the year it introduced the FG-28A, its first upper gastrointestinal fiberscope. Video followed: the company dates its first monochrome video processor and video scopes to 1987 and its first colour video processor to 1997.

The same timeline lists a run of “world’s first” claims, among them the EB-1900 video bronchoscope of 1988, an ultrasound upper gastrointestinal fiberscope in 1990 and a video naso-pharyngo-laryngoscope in 1993; these are the company’s own descriptions. Its American arm, renamed PENTAX of America in 2004, bought the operating assets of Kay Elemetrics in 2005, and an “ENT & Speech” line still sits in the range. Later entries include the EPK-i video processor of 2007, which the company calls the first mega-pixel video processor, and, in 2013, i-scan Optical Enhancement, which it describes as combining bandwidth-limited light with digital image processing; i-scan modes still appear on its current processors.

Today the company groups its products into upper GI, lower GI, biliopancreatic, pulmonology and ENT and speech, with video processors, endoscopes and infection-prevention products. Its current processors are the INSPIRA and the LED-based IMAGINA. The trade publication Healthcare in Europe reported on 3 May 2023 that Pentax Medical had launched the INSPIRA video processor, model EPK-i8020c, together with the i20c video endoscope series at ESGE Days 2023 in Dublin, the congress of the European Society of Gastrointestinal Endoscopy. The company says the processor can also work with older generations of its endoscopes.

Pentax Medical describes itself as based in Japan, with research, manufacturing and service operations across Japan, Europe and the United States and a presence in more than 120 countries.

Scopes, towers and congresses.

Endoscopy and minimally invasive surgery are sold to a small, expert audience: surgeons, gastroenterologists, theatre nurses and the hospital teams who buy and reprocess equipment. The makers’ public image follows from that. A familiar picture in this field is the instrument itself, a slim scope coiled on a white ground or a rigid telescope laid out at full length, shown with little else around it, so that the length, the bend and the tip carry the image.

The second familiar picture is the operating theatre. Here the product is the system rather than the single instrument: a video tower of camera units and light sources beside the table, and a team of surgeons looking up at a screen rather than down at the patient. Some makers go a step further and present the whole room; Karl Storz, for example, showed its OR1 integrated operating room at the Medica trade fair in 1998, the company says. Close by sit macro shots of instrument tips, clips and jaws, where the detail is the subject.

Much of the communication happens face to face. Makers run training and visitor centres where clinicians handle equipment and practise techniques; Karl Storz says it opened a logistics and training centre in Tuttlingen in 1999. Congresses matter as much: Digestive Disease Week (DDW) in the United States, UEG Week in Europe and the annual meeting of the Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons (SAGES) are where new scopes, generators and accessories are shown to the people who will use them.

The makers in this guide range from long-established German firms to younger companies elsewhere, and from full endoscope systems to single devices. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: who founded it, who owns it and what it says about where its products are made, and it marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A camera name kept for endoscopes.

The endoscope business outlasted the camera company. In December 2006 Pentax began the process of merging with HOYA, the Tokyo glass and optics group; English Wikipedia says HOYA’s main aim was to strengthen its medical business using Pentax’s expertise in endoscopes and related fields. The first plan, a share swap, was called off in April 2007, and HOYA instead made a tender offer, completed on 6 August 2007, that gave it just over 90 per cent of Pentax. The two companies merged on 31 March 2008, with HOYA as the surviving company, HOYA’s own history page records.

HOYA kept the Pentax name for its medical products while selling other parts. The surveying-instrument business went to Taiwan Instrument in 2009 and, in October 2011, the Pentax imaging systems business went to Ricoh, which now makes Pentax cameras; Japanese Wikipedia says HOYA kept endoscopes and related products under the PENTAX Medical brand. That is why two unrelated businesses now share the Pentax name.

Under HOYA, the history pages of both companies list a series of additions: Digital Endoscopy GmbH in 2012; a majority stake in Wassenburg, a maker of automated endoscope reprocessors, in 2013; an investment in the British electrosurgery company Creo Medical in 2015; the purchase of C2 Therapeutics in 2016–17; and, in July 2017, a flexible-endoscopy joint venture with the Chinese company Aohua. HOYA’s life-care pages describe Pentax Medical’s video scopes and fiberscopes as serving digestive, ear-nose-and-throat and respiratory medicine.

For a design guide, Pentax Medical shows how an old optics name can be carried into a single specialist field after the original company has gone. Compare HOYA, its parent, and Olympus, another Tokyo optics firm that turned to endoscopes. For this guide we use a deep teal, graphite and a clinical white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Pentax Medical’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.