ebrandon Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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I'm sad to say that with the latest Canon announcements I see the beginnings of the kind of price inflation we've seen in other fields.
Six to 12 months ago we were all shocked by the $1250 price tag for the 24-105 and the $800 list price for the 10-22 efs. Now those have come to seem fairly normal. Less than a year later people are expressing amazement at an $1150 ef-s lens and a $2100 85mmL.
I think that what is happening is that as digital photography becomes increasingly easy, fun, and trendy, tons of new people are entering this hobby, and many of them are wealthy folks who are accustomed to paying $100k to remodel a kitchen, or a $25k premium for a "tuned" version of a car or $3k more for extra legroom on a flight and to these people $1000 for a lens seems cheap.
With all these people entering the photography hobby the manufacturers would be out of their minds not to try and find out what prices the market will bear -- and as they jack prices up into the stratosphere with each new product cycle they will be surprised and amazed at how high they can go!
Let me give you an analogy from another field I'm involved in -- high end audio. Ten years ago a $4000 amplifier or a $15000 pair of speakers was considered extremely rarified high-end esoterica. Today mainstream audiophile amps cost $5-$20k and most audiophile speaker manufacturers' "core" offerings are in the $10-$40k range. Additionally manufacturers are constantly testing the waters with $70k turntables and $100+k speakers to find what the market will bear.
The same could easily happen to photography -- where there's a huge amazingly cheap mass market of decent quality sony, panasonic, canon rebel-type, etc. DSLRs. But if you want the really good stuff -- the state of the art stuff -- the manufacturers will have discovered that they can make a lot more money selling 1000 lenses at $10k a pop than 10,000 lenses at $1k each.
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