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p.1 #7 · p.1 #7 · Are smaller lenses more expensive to produce and develop? m43 question... | |
[Jon dons his tweed jacket with leather elbow patches.]
Equivalent lenses don't have the same focal length, they have the same angle of view over the diameter of the image circle they project (or the sensor they're designed to project upon). A 50mm lens on a very small sensor is a very long lens. Long lenses have high magnification, both of the subject and of the lens' aberrations. Long lenses are particularly subject to chromatic aberrations. On the other hand, a 50mm lens on a very large sensor is a very wide lens. Wide lenses must bend light sharply, and are particularly subject to distortion, field curvature, and coma. A lens designer must consider whether a lens is long or wide in order to anticipate the aberrations they must balance out; they don't design a lens by its focal length and then extrapolate the elements to fit the necessary image circle. Therefore, equivalent lenses in this discussion should have the same field of view.
So why, then, is the Olympus 25mm f/1.8 far more expensive than the Canon and Nikon 50mm f/1.8 lenses?
1. The Olympus has an internal motor, which the Canon does not. {This is incorrect; see AhamB's post and my reply below.} That alone is a significant expense. The Nikon does, though, so I'll compare the Olympus to the Nikon.
2. The Olympus has more elements and more doublets, and more aspherics. The Olympus has 18 finished surfaces, 4 of which are cemented together and 2 of which are aspheric; the Nikon has 14 finished surfaces, 2 of which are cemented together and 1 of which is aspheric. The Olympus is simply a more complex lens to assemble.
3. The Olympus also has a closer minimum focus distance and has an aperture that closes down further. Both of these again make the Olympus more complex.
4. Presumably, since Nikon has been making lenses for the 135 format for 50+ years, they've already paid for a considerable amount of the sunk cost of engineering and tooling for these lenses. Olympus might have to recover more of these one-time expenses with each lens it sells, therefore pricing its equivalent lenses higher than Nikon.
5. Presumably, Nikon sells more lenses than Olympus and can manufacture, distribute, and service them more efficiently due to economies of scale. This implies that Nikon can sell an equivalent product at a lower price with the same profit as Olympus could.
6. It is plausible, though I doubt likely, that Nikon doesn't try to profit from the sale of mid-level lenses as much as Olympus is. There are two reasons for this.
6a. Nikon might predict better sales of top-tier lenses to those customers who have already purchased a second interchangeable lens, and so they try to increase the number of such customers by subsidizing the cost of mid-level products. Nikon wants people to buy the f/1.8 lens and then, later, the f/1.4 lens, while Olympus' f/1.8 is their top-tier offering.
6b. Nikon might face greater competition from the used market. There are so many 50mm Nikkors out there that Nikon might not be able to sell new lenses at a normal profit margin, but instead accept a few pennies per purchase rather than forego the sale entirely. Olympus, on the other hand, faces relatively little competition from used m4/3 lenses.
7. Magnification. Simply put, since a m4/3-frame image must be magnified twice as much as an equivalent 135-frame image, m4/3 lenses must produce aberrations that are one-half the size of their 135-frame counterparts just to maintain equality. This is independent of pixel resolution so long as the aberration is larger than the pixel size. This means that polishing, assembly, focus, and handling tolerances must be more strict for m4/3 lenses than for 135-frame lenses, and therefore more expensive.
7-contra. Since the optics in a m4/3 lens are smaller than in a 135-frame lens, it is possible for Olympus to use technologies that don't (yet) scale well to the larger elements that Nikon requires. For example, a good cell phone lens is staggeringly well corrected and might cost no more than $20, but the materials and processes that allow such precision don't work for larger lenses. My guess is that sometimes smaller lenses at equivalent quality are cheaper and sometimes they're more expensive; I simply don't know how this applies to the Olympus/Nikon conversation besides mentioning it as a possibility.
The bottom line is that they are two companies producing two different yet competing products. It could be that the more expensive product is simply produced by the less efficient company. In this case, though, I think that the Olympus lens is a sufficiently more complex product to explain higher production costs and therefore higher offering price. I don't know, however, whether it offers enough value--to me or to you--to justify the purchase of the lens at that price.
Cheers,
Jon
[...who doffs his jacket, puts on his Irish cap, and goes for a pint.]
Edited on Mar 22, 2014 at 10:57 AM · View previous versions
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