On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 11:22:00AM -0600, steve harley wrote: > On 2011-04-18 08:26 , Godfrey DiGiorgi wrote: > >I was at the camera shop on Saturday and spent some time evaluating a > >Leica M8. Yeah, yeah, the red dot costs a fortune. What appealed to me > >was its stark simplicity: everythiing on the camera enables, motivates > >you to concentrate on the subject and the task at hand, not fuss with > >camera settings or optional feature configurations. Why is such a tool > >for the photographer exclusive to those whose pay grade is several > >stratospheric levels higher than mine? Can it really be that expensive > >to build a simpler camera without all the fluffy stuff? > > i don't really follow Leica, but i expect all of the below has been > said before: > > under current market conditions, one appeal? to a much wider > audience by including the fluffy stuff; some of the fluffy stuff > actually addresses niche needs, and a lot of the fluffy stuff is > cheap to include (so one challenge is to include fluff without > alienating refined users) > > so fluff ==> economies of scale > > Leica probably also avoids competing on price to keep profit margins high
There's also a fairly limited market for cameras priced at $5000 and above. About the only people Leica would compete with if they introduced a cheaper model would be themselves, so they have no incentive to do so. Anyone other than Leica trying to sell into that marketplace would have a hard time selling enough cameras for it to be a worthwhile business, even if they could manufacture and sell the a system at a significantly lower price. They still wouldn't be able to sell to the non-trivial chunk of the market place who wouldn't buy a better camera at half the price if it didn't have the cachet of that little red dot. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
