On 2/25/06 12:14 PM, "Joseph Tainter", <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I cannot buy a new DSLR every two or > three years. This very true. I guess this trend was purposely amplified by Canon (marketing). There is no doubt that they have technical prowess (at least for now) and they certainly know how to use it. Canon was the only one who has been revising/updating models almost every 6 months, let alone 2~3 years. They have been doing this for their entry/mid models, not for their top ends. In fact, this was their deliberate strategy (I am not criticizing them, but just telling the facts :-) to leave the competitions behind. For example, in their stockholders meeting last year, they presented the state of their technological advantage and emphasized the "proto-less" development (I may have posted this before). What this means is that they were restructuring the engineering process so that they could eliminate the prototyping stage, thus considerably shortening the time required from the product conception to the actual market release. However, lately, this strategy is beginning to backfire as customers complain various problems and too short a product cycle. Every time they buy Rebel or 10D/20D/30D etc, they knew that their equipment will become obsolete within a few months. Pentax product cycle was not particularly slow or fast, although they started late and got dragged by Canon's practice. Nikon took 3 years from D100 to D200. It appears that Canon is finally slowing down. FF market is not well embraced yet except for PJ and amateur enthusiast (in Japan, only 25% of DSLR users want the FF), and the bulk of the market is in APS sized sensors. Here, the mp race for example appears to be slowing down and the technology seems to be embarking on the maturing stage. Film technology had matured long time ago, and the product cycle of the camera/lens was much longer. This enabled mfrs to produce much desirable bodies that could be kept for years. Nikon's D200 appears to be in this category. Today, the DSLR product cycle is too short and nobody is investing in producing durable and "pleasure-to-own" cameras, yet they do so on their high-ends which do not change for much longer time. So, you can see how Canon see the bulk of the market and create sustainable demands. Hope this will begin to change so that we will see more durable and desirable camera body, and I certainly hope that the next Pentax DSLR is one such camera. Well, if anybody would be conscious (and conscientious :-) about it, it has to be Pentax :-). Ken
