Pareto principle applies more or less everywhere. You know the drill, 20% of the effort for 80% of the performance. Want 25% more? Pay five times more.
-R&D costs of cameras with FF and MF sensors go bananas partly because of the extra processing power needed, but not only that: shutters and mirrors have to be larger and heavier, increasing the mechanical complexity. While the overpricing applies mostly to digital, a good Pentax 67 still sells for a bunch of money now, used.
-Lenses have to be substantially larger. Well-performing glass is expensive, more so if the image circle they cover is twice as large as APS-C. My Tamron 17-50 barely covers anything beyond the corners of the APS-C crop.
-Inflation is a thing
because our beloved economic gurus insist that rampant consumerism is the only way forward (towards a cliff but yay). A 2012 camera that cost $2000 is equivalent to $2236 today, which isn't *that* much but it's still over 10%.
That said, APS-C is definitely the best value for money: economy of scale helps, sizes are large enough that costs related to miniaturization are kept in check and quality is still well ahead of typical displays (namely screens under 8K resolution).
---------- Post added 10-17-19 at 08:56 AM ----------
Originally posted by biz-engineer I can't print it larger than about 24 x 36" otherwise it looks fuzzy even at normal viewing distance.
I have a wallpaper, downsampled to 1920x1200p, on my... 32 x 52 cm (13 x 20") monitor and it looks swell. It was taken with the
K-7. The K-1, particularly with Pixel-Shift, should be more than capable of printing even larger than twice this...