moondigger wrote:There's no way it costs them more than a few hundred dollars to build each one (parts & labor). Tack on money to recoup R&D costs, plus distribution costs, plus advertising costs, and amortize the amount it will cost them to do free (warranty) repairs at the expected defect rate, and you'll arrive at the total cost figure for Canon. I seriously doubt it's more than $1000.

Unless you have some foundation for these number, this has got to be the most absured post I've read here in a while. Seriously, its getting really out of hand how much of a waste many (most?) of the posts in the gear forums are. All the usefull talk of gear is drowned out by people with no idea what they are talking about.

CTYankee wrote:
Unless you have some foundation for these number, this has got to be the most absured post I've read here in a while. Seriously, its getting really out of hand how much of a waste many (most?) of the posts in the gear forums are. All the usefull talk of gear is drowned out by people with no idea what they are talking about.

And you base your objection on... what exactly?

This thread has been all about speculation. My speculation is based on what I've read about manufacturing and retail. How is my speculation any more of a waste than anybody else's?

Furthermore, how can my posts on a thread like this drown out "useful talk of gear?"

If you think I have no idea what I'm talking about on this -- or any other -- topic, then don't bother reading or responding to my posts. The fact is that my experience in photography has been useful here on many different topics, and my speculation has been sometimes correct, sometimes incorrect. There's really no need to get insulting just because you have an inflated sense of what it costs to manufacture a camera.

PrecisionPhoto wrote:
tuantran wrote:
So Russ, I get it that you're pretty confident that the 1D Mark III will be full frame and under $4500?

If you're right and if you're in San Francisco, I'll buy you dinner at Boulevard.



I'll be there to and I'll buy the drinks and take a pictures of you all with the new 1D Mark 3
I hope your right because that's exactly how I picture the next 1D

Don''t forget me Russ - I'll fly over especially.

Apple tries to keep profits at around 20-33% on the whole (their actual cost, compared to wholesale + retail prices... average, remember... wholesale is lower margin). Third party dealers make anywhere from 8%-15% profit (retail price compared to cost) depending on the line.

Retailor will try to sell you extra ram, a printer, a bag, .mac, cables, coffee mugs, etc because that is what gets the retail margins on the whole package up to 20%.

Retail margins of third party, official Canon dealers (not super volume people like B&H or Dell) on bodies and lenses runs around 10%-20% (or did, at least, a few years ago).

That's 3rd party retailers, not Canon. Volume guys probably get slightly better prices... 5% better, maybe? I can't really be sure on this... never worked for those guys.

Places like Dell are special, actually. They might in fact sell an item in a short burst at what LOOKS like a loss. It all depends on warehouse space, projected volume on that item.... and importantly... on OTHER items it may need room for.

Here's a simplified scenario (it gets WAY WAY more complicated). Dell (or it's supplier) has lots of stock of product A-- more than it should-- and product A doesn't generate much revenue-- is low volume and low margin. Dell has tons of sales volume of product B, and makes high margins. Dell is limited by how much of its assets and space are tied up in product A, so it firesales it for a limited window, in order to move product B... or carry more product B.

In this way, it might sell product A at a loss (cost to sale price), but actually, it is MAKING money by reducing its opportunity cost when related to Product B. It makes more and more sense when you have thousands of products and a computer making projections. Advanced economics goes way beyond simply the marginal cost of a product and the sale price. Opportunity cost is idiotic for a company to ignore-- and believe me, any company worth its weight is constantly seeing what will make it MORE money... and sometimes that means selling at a loss. And Dell is famous for this. Literally, people have written about it.

The side effect is that folks will now pay attention to Dell, looking for that rare super deal. Marketing side LOVES this.

moondigger wrote:
CTYankee wrote:
Unless you have some foundation for these number, this has got to be the most absured post I've read here in a while. Seriously, its getting really out of hand how much of a waste many (most?) of the posts in the gear forums are. All the usefull talk of gear is drowned out by people with no idea what they are talking about.

And you base your objection on... what exactly?

9 years product development, manufacturing, and marketing experience.

This is from that FF white paper, released August 2006:

" If the sensors are APS-C size, there are about 200 of them on the wafer, depending on layout and the design of the periphery of each sensor. For APS-H, there are about 46 or so. Full-frame sensors? Just 20."

And:

"For now, appreciate that a full-frame sensor costs not three or four times, but ten, twenty or more times as much as an APS-C sensor."

Let's assume an aps-c sensor costs $50-100 to produce. That means that a FF sensor would cost $500-$2000 to produce (APS-C range multiplied by 10 to 20: $50 x 10 --> $100 x 20 to get range).

And that's just the sensor.

Now, if you take a middle of the road range, and look at the price difference between the 30D and the 5D... that sensor price starts to look just about right! It appears the sensor makes up a big part of the difference in cost.

moondigger wrote:
That's nothing more than an inability to know now what you would do if you had such a camera in your hands. That's not meant as an insult. I just mean that you think right now you'd have no real use for 5 more megapixels. Yet if you actually had one you'd find plenty of uses for them. Good photojournalism isn't just about tight head shots... it's often about putting a subject into context. That 5 megapixels sitting outside the boundaries of the current 1.3x crop sensor in the 1DMk2n could capture the surroundings that put your subject into a clearer context. If you don't need them after all, you can crop them out and still have exactly what you had with the Mk2n.

You may not see this now, and you may reject the idea later if such a camera is produced. But again I believe the majority of PJs & sports shooters would upgrade almost immediately.

As cwphoto pointed out, both the 1.6x crop cameras and the full-frame cameras have a wide variety of ultra-wide angle solutions; only the 1.3x crop cameras don't.

Cheers...


Putting aside PJ's a 12MP FF is just to low a pixel density for wildlife and birding work and 8fps isn't much of an incentive. I can't find many people that would pick a 5D over a 20D for wildlife shooting. To me the only sensible path if the 1 series reamians as two distinct lines is to increase the APS-H pixel count to ~13MP (current 30D density) and move the 1Ds to 22MP. If Digic III doubles data throughput a 13MP APS-H will still maintain 8.5fps and perhaps Canon can push this out to 9-10fps. A 22MP FF could achieve 5fps at the same time.

I also see no point at all in offering two FF 1 series cameras and would actually expect the 5D replacement to be split into 2 lines: a cheaper version say the 7D wich retains almost all the current features of the 5D and a higher performance version with 5fps, possibly ~16MP, sealing and larger AF point coverage and performance. The 1D III say would still be the uber fast workhorse but with 13MP an ideal allround camera for pretty much anything but a killer birding/wildlife camera.

I used to think that the maximum framerate was determined by the I/O power of the DIGIC chip... Well, I was wrong. See my explanation here:

http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/482198/2

DIGIC II info here: http://www.canon.com/technology/canon_tech/explanation/digic_slr.html

The 1DII and 1DsII both have the same pixelthroughput. Both have a sensor read-out with 8 channels at 16 MHz. The Bayer pattern gets translated by the front-end processing circuit, which sends the compressed RAW data to DIGIC. This amounts to less than 100 megabyte per second, which is peanuts for a DDR SDRAM buffer.

The 5D uses only a 4 channel output and by looking at the mpixel/sec numbers, it appears it has a front-end processing circuit that operates at 18 MHz instead of 16.
So, at an educated guess, framerate is determined by the number of read-out channels and sample rate of the front-end processing chip. Not by DIGIC.

Write speed to CF, now that's a different story. Just look at the diagram.

Pixel Perfect wrote:
The 1D III would still be the uber fast workhorse but with 13MP an ideal allround camera for pretty much anything but a killer birding/wildlife camera.

That is exactly the camera I am looking for. It would match the pixel amount of top Nikons, but have APS-H instead of APS-C, and use its full sensor also at highest frame rate.

If instead of 30D's pixel density it would have 400D's pixel density, it could have 16 MP, but there might be no major incentive for Canon to go that far in this upgrade cycle - or if such small pixels would add some noise, it would be a disincentive.