I see a LOT of promotional efforts in all directions, I see much more promotional efforts than engineering efforts. It is a sign that marketing was the way chosen to grow the camera market (like for cosmetics, coca cola, pepsi, redbull). Redbull is an amazing company, the marketing department is oversized, they make money out of selling "Redbull" written on T-shirts, hats and coffee mugs, they charge several euro for sugared water, if you want to learn how to sell nothing for a price, go learn marketing at Redbull.
Somehow, even the cheapest camera models are very expensive for what it does for its owner, relative to other kind of products. Cars, for example contains a lot of R&D, and a lot of material (big engine, chassis, design of exterior, lighting, interior comfort, LCD panel, user interface sofware, sensors, ABS, airbags, tires etc etc etc..). In some cases, a camera system is priced as high as a small/medium car.
Overall, I am not sure if any of the new camera models appeal to me: a small mother board (smaller and cheaper than any mother board in a PC) with a small ARM based CPU not even as powerful as small tablet PC, a bunch of DRAM, a small image sensor, a few buttons, packaged into a small metal (or plastic) frame into a plastic body, the whole thing worth something like $250 to $350 bill of material. Multiply that cost by 3 or 4 and you get the price without advertising, add 50% to pay off promotional efforts (DPReview bla-bla-bla) and you get a small brick that costs 10 times the bill of materials and give you photographs with 8 stops latitude...
The quantity of camera models is there, delivered with
quantity of gadget features that no one end up using... Even for a 5 grands cameras, you get on the handle a plastic rubber glued and that costs a few cents and that you have to glue back after a few years of use... Even old Pentax 6x7, with the technology of its time, was better built !
In a healthy market, a medium format camera should be priced less than half of the current prices, a lot more people should have one, there should be much less gadget features, and there should be much much less advertising. I just don't like what's being sold. Leica SL type quality with a large sensor 33x44 , should be the standard at a fraction of the Leica prices. But this is not what we see, what we see is a lot of advertising money being wasted by companies releasing far too many new models with none of the model bringing anything revolutionary over old models. Two or three camera brands would be enough, divide the number of new camera models by 3 or 4, and put more quality and a larger sensor into fewer models. People get sold plastic blobs for several thousand Euro/Dollars, to take pictures...
I'm not old fashion, I just like that if I spend more than 5 grands on a camera system, I get a nicely finished and robust product, not a plastic molded disposable toy that is obsolete in two years because a newer model (as crappy built as the previous one) is released and hyped over and over and over again on DPReview.
Last edited by biz-engineer; 02-15-2019 at 08:35 AM.