Godfrey DiGiorgi wrote: >> But it's particularly this kind of stupidity that lowers profit >> margins. Likely thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in >> productive time wasted to save pennies that will never be recouped. > >I disagree. $0.01 in production cost on an item that will be >manufactured in the tens of thousands runs into thousands of dollars >of manufacturing cost, and with retail markup from manufacturing cost >being on the order of 5x to 10x cost, it save substantially on >product cost to the purchaser. From the other direction, what drives >profit margins down on low end products is competition from other >vendors, not time spent reducing cost of manufacture. > >These notions are part and parcel of volume manufacturing economics. >The people spending time in the engineering department and at >meetings are being paid on fixed salaries most of the time, their >reason for being hired in the first place is to do these sorts of >things, so it is not "tens of thousands of dollars in productive time >wasted". They're doing the job they were intended to do, that cost is >part of the overall investment in development of any product, not the >running costs of manufacture.
It's also worth noting that besides some circuitry in the camera they save the cost of the additional metering sensor in the mirror box and, at least as significantly, its calibration during manufacturing. Simplifying manufacturing is being pursued with a vengeance everywhere. We probably should have seen this change coming when the MZ-S was introduced with P-TTL in 2001. I expect the only reason it took so long was that there were so few P-TTL flash options. Now we have the AF360FGZ and AF540FGZ from Pentax and the EF500DG Super and EF500ST from Sigma - and probably others coming soon. One benefit of Samsung selling Pentax cameras now is that the increased volume will make supporting Pentax more attractive to third party manufacturers.
