p.30 #1 · Official: Sony RX1R III Digital Camera announced!
I did buy a third party hood for my RX1Rii. I bought a Thumbs Up grip for a more expensive price than some other third party products, but ergonomics were much better than the Sony and third party one’s. Lets see of they make one foe the iii.
zerodeefex wrote:
I did exactly this with the RX1R II. The Sony round hood was like $150-200. I bought nice metal third party ones for $30-40, even before we had all these options. Same for the thumb grip. I have a beautiful one that is brassing nicely and it was a fraction of the price.
I think people forget that these cameras were ALWAYS "luxury" items. You have a limited number of these things selling AND your attach rates are limited. If you're doing small runs of things like this, your margins have to adjust accordingly.
p.30 #2 · Official: Sony RX1R III Digital Camera announced!
I am fairly certain I’m using a thumbs up grip. Was that one of the first brass ones?
Latouf wrote:
I did buy a third party hood for my RX1Rii. I bought a Thumbs Up grip for a more expensive price than some other third party products, but ergonomics were much better than the Sony and third party one’s. Lets see of they make one foe the iii.
p.30 #3 · Official: Sony RX1R III Digital Camera announced!
Alan Parker wrote:
Exactly. Sony marketing decided that this is now a boutique camera, like the Q3/Q343.
The customer then gets rewarded with boutique pricing for a camera that is not really a boutique camera. You pay Leica prices for a camera that is not a Leica camera. Cam's review on the previous page shows that very well.
My guess is that this is actually very much a boutique camera - more so than the Q3 or Q3 43mm APO is for Leica, which is dependent on profits from those cameras. Inside of Sony, this camera probably does not make a blip on their income statement even for the camera division regardless of if it does well or badly.
I also think if marketing designed this camera, it would look a lot different and they would be a lot more involved in the marketing of this camera. The fact that a lot of marketing wasn't done and no influencers were extolling the virtues of this probably shows this was a bit of an unsanctioned release. I don't think they're clever enough to pretend to not market it to market it.
From a pure materials cost perspective, and tariffs aside, even if they used mostly off the shelf parts, my guess is unless they had a bunch of Zeiss 35mm f2's lying around, the lenses probably cost more to build than they did 10 years ago as does the human labor of assembling these cameras. It must've been some sort of limited production run they did and probably not cheap considering the Zeiss/Sony collaboration has been quiet for a long time.
p.30 #6 · Official: Sony RX1R III Digital Camera announced!
Not sure how NA/EU presents it in their stores, but JP has the M3 right at the front of the stores on its on own pedestal area. The marketing angle might be that once you actually have it in your hands, your perception shifts from specs alone to actual focal point of the concept. It would make more sense cause influencer clout sphere is actually not as effective as during its peak due to saturation fatigue and ad association.
People will mostly watch videos to confirm their bias on whether they love or hate the product since their decision to purchase or not has already been made prior to consuming media about it.
p.30 #8 · Official: Sony RX1R III Digital Camera announced!
Alan Parker wrote:
Exactly. Sony marketing decided that this is now a boutique camera, like the Q3/Q343.
The customer then gets rewarded with boutique pricing for a camera that is not really a boutique camera. You pay Leica prices for a camera that is not a Leica camera. Cam's review on the previous page shows that very well.
Sony didn't really decide this IMO--the market did. Shooters decided the RX1 line is boutique by not purchasing much even when it was cheaper and there were far less options on the market. So, Sony has increased the price to make a viable product after the long hiatus. Sure, the Q's have somethings the RX1's don't, and RX1's have things the Q's do not. but those comparing a Q and RX1 just isn't apples to apples even though they are the only 2 FF fixed lenses cameras on the market. And, that again, points to just how boutique this segment is. If there were a lot of market share to fight for, we see Nikon and Canon and possibly others in the mix.
p.30 #9 · Official: Sony RX1R III Digital Camera announced!
Mark Galer had a nice video on the RX1Rii from earlier this year that had a bit on real world analysis of how one would make an Riii. He was surprisingly prescient about some of the decisions and need for compromises. I was surprised at the lack of IBIS, but more people would want fancy AF. The built-in EVF on v2 was not my favorite, but the add on and tiltable EvF that sits in the hot shoe was nice. Adding much else onto the camera would have made it the same size or larger than the a7CR…first world problems.
I am not sure how the very nice Zeiss will hold up on 60mp. The lens on the Q3 43 more than matches the resolution of its 60mp sensor. I am not sure that the higher sensor resolution was a needed addition here. If one assumes that the target audience is well heeled owners of the prior RX1 series, whether this one warrants consideration really hinges on how the camera was used.
For me, the optical stabilization in the 43 was critical, to compensate for some handshake that I have these days. IBIS might have been yet better, but so far, so good. The Riii not having IBIS removes any buyer’s remorse I might have had.
p.30 #10 · Official: Sony RX1R III Digital Camera announced!
I found some good Japanese reviews. Many of them are hands on at Sony stores. Just translate to English using google. One says it is produced at the Sony Koda site in Aichi Prefecture.
p.30 #11 · Official: Sony RX1R III Digital Camera announced!
tiltonlane wrote:
I found some good Japanese reviews. Many of them are hands on at Sony stores. Just translate to English using google. One says it is produced at the Sony Koda site in Aichi Prefecture.
p.30 #12 · Official: Sony RX1R III Digital Camera announced!
Everything online surrounding this camera just feels very weird. I pre-ordered the camera six days ago and have been scouring YouTube daily for videos about it. Just like in all the photography forums, most of the videos highlight the same "faults" (no tilt screen, no IBIS, no full-size battery).
The things I see over and over that are weird are the first thing the early videos wanted to stress was the "feel" of the camera. Some negative and some positive. The people who actually have the camera in-hand all seem to have excuses as to why they haven't gone out and shot with it yet, but they have no problem taking the time to chat about it.
The majority of the videos are not from the usual influencers or reviewers, but from people I've rarely watched or never heard of before. It just all feels bizarre, like the release of information and proper reviews is being intentionally reserved, controlled.
p.30 #13 · Official: Sony RX1R III Digital Camera announced!
Not just you. The camera seems to be in the hands of some youtubers with smaller followings, and some that are a bit polarizing (like Cam Mackey posted earlier).
I really wonder why Sony chose these people to give the camera too. Hell, I've been using my RX1s daily since 2014 - think I can get an M3 from Sony? I'll happily give a review on it
p.30 #14 · Official: Sony RX1R III Digital Camera announced!
Some of the snaps from the other day in store. Didnt check the JPG quality so these are most likely the smaller size. You can still see some stuff like bokeh quality though: https://imgur.com/a/lKhUEcz (copypaste)
p.30 #15 · Official: Sony RX1R III Digital Camera announced!
Just a quick reminder to people who commented on "lens matching the sensor" or "lens resolving the sensor":
Lens resolution and sensor resolution are independent from each other.
What we call sharpness is the same thing as contrast, only measured at higher frequencies. It is measured in %. Look at the y-axis on MTF charts. Therefore combined performance of an optical system consisting of a sensor and a lens, is a factor i.e. (lens MTF × sensor MTF).
There is no such thing as "lens out-resolving a sensor". First, you have lens losing some detail and then sensor loses some % of what remained. You can improve the combined MTF by improving either the lens, sensor, or both. Which means that even a mediocre lens can benefit from a higher-resolution sensor and vice versa.
BTW this should be intuitive to people with less than perfect vision. Even though your eyes are blurry, you can still quite reliably distinquish between a perfectly sharp image and a slightly blurry image, even though your eyes don't "resolve" your monitor.
p.30 #16 · Official: Sony RX1R III Digital Camera announced!
Cloudbow wrote:
Everything online surrounding this camera just feels very weird. I pre-ordered the camera six days ago and have been scouring YouTube daily for videos about it. Just like in all the photography forums, most of the videos highlight the same "faults" (no tilt screen, no IBIS, no full-size battery).
The things I see over and over that are weird are the first thing the early videos wanted to stress was the "feel" of the camera. Some negative and some positive. The people who actually have the camera in-hand all seem to have excuses as to why they haven't gone out and shot with it yet, but they have no problem taking the time to chat about it.
The majority of the videos are not from the usual influencers or reviewers, but from people I've rarely watched or never heard of before. It just all feels bizarre, like the release of information and proper reviews is being intentionally reserved, controlled.
Really feels like an internal political battle between product and marketing - e.g. Sony marketing must either not have wanted this camera or unhappy they were informed about it last minute so the campaigns seem half hearted and borderline intentional sabotaging. Compare this to the Fuji GFX marketing campaigns, you can clearly see a difference in effort and tone for a similarly tricky camera to market.
p.30 #17 · Official: Sony RX1R III Digital Camera announced!
weezintrumpete wrote:
Not just you. The camera seems to be in the hands of some youtubers with smaller followings, and some that are a bit polarizing (like Cam Mackey posted earlier).
Jared Polin and Tony Northrup both have access to one. I suspect we will see more videos in the next few days.
p.30 #18 · Official: Sony RX1R III Digital Camera announced!
tiltonlane wrote:
I found some good Japanese reviews. Many of them are hands on at Sony stores. Just translate to English using google. One says it is produced at the Sony Koda site in Aichi Prefecture.
The Japan market price is referred to as 660000 JPY in many sources (it should include 10% tax) and if that's the specific price that will be charged at Sony online store and certain other stores like Bic Camera, Yodobashi Camera etc. there will probably be other stores like Map Camera where the tax-inclusive price will be about 10% less (around 600K), following the usual pricing among those stores. The 10% discount discussed in that article is Sony's 10% discount on Audio Video products that is available for their online shop customers under some conditions. That discount is not really applicable for tourists.
RX1R3 will be available for pre-orders in Japan from tomorrow 10am so that's when the prices will become properly visible in all Japanese stores.
Japan market models of Sony cameras are pretty much always limited to having Japanese UI language only, so buying the camera from Japan as a tourist will come with caveats. Sony does sell international models in Japan too (with lots of UI languages and international warranty) in limited stores but those are usually priced higher than local versions.
I'm not personally planning to buy this one as I'm not that much into fixed lens cameras (although I love small cameras combined with small lenses). I did buy RX1R 2nd hand several years ago though but that's still my only fixed lens camera.
