Originally posted by VoiceOfReason The more I see of it the more I like it. It's perfectly suited for the type of shooting I do at anime conventions. Forget a new body if one comes out in the fall, I want one of these. The body can wait.
And right here is a summary of what ails the stalled and failing camera industry.
This is exactly why lens prices have gone up, and the K-30 gets re-enacted as the K-50 (and the D7000 as the 7100, and the T3i as the T4i).
Quote: Again, a lack of respect for the optical engineering achievement. First and foremost, you have to throw talent at the design. It isn't replaced by CAM, just like it isn't in architecture.
Moreover, the price is very low and aggressive, actually. The weight is the weight of 35/1.8 mm of glass.
I'm not impugning the optical engineering. I am simply saying any optical company with enough resources could do this. There is a tremendous homogeneity in the optical industry now. Differences between manufacturers based on engineering are nil. Canon, Fuji, and even Pentax could have made this lens. They did not for economic reasons.
First, it's a lens that requires an installed base across multiple platforms.
Second, it is a high-priced lens. It's got halo effect, early adopter discounting applied on a lens with a MSRP of $1160. That's right on Sigma's website.
Why do this?
Because dedicated camera sales have stalled or declined. Since you cannot count on many more new customers to the dedicated camera market, you need to discount to move product. Sigma can (in fact has to) do that because they are entirely after-market. That's also why Canikon, Sony, Pentax, Fuji all raised their lens prices recently...to make up for declining unit volumes of cameras. This at a time when the Yen is falling.
Kudos to Sigma for innovating a market niche. However, it is a niche. Look at sales data and what is telling is either a FF large system camera or a small DSLR or mirrorless system camera. The middle is being gutted (seen a D400 on the horizon?). So a large expensive lens for a smaller than FF sensor with a limited FL range would never survive as a Pentax or Canon or Nikon-only offering. It needs to cross brands to survive. The price and size on APS-C are now going in opposite directions from the market data. Lenses like this are no longer driving camera sales. They do not make new customers for the DSLR market.
So it is a niche at even US$800/unit. The APS-C market is going to hit very turbulent times as FF goes downprice and mirrorless steals chunks of the middle. The days of DA* lenses selling for over $1,000 are coming to an end in APS-C because the entire price point of the system is falling. FF is chewing the higher end to pieces.
What Sigma is doing here is swimming upstream where there are still fishermen. They can do this because the price of FF is still too high for many and because there is always a demand for fast glass from prosumers regardless of the size penalty. However, in the long run, big glass for APS-C is problematic. The 18-35 is 300 grams more than the DA*16-50 losing 2mm wide and 15mm long, so Sigma is competing on price and aperture. Nevertheless a huge chunk of consumer activity is going away from big glass for APS-C regardless.
The bulk of APS-C revenues are going to come from smaller system cameras. Big glass, big bodies are going to FF. APS-C DSLR's are going to need smaller bodies (Canon's SL1 and the Pentax K-x get it mostly right...the K-30/50 is IMO a step back in form factor). They will need smaller, lighter, less expensive lenses (DA 35/2.4 and 50/1.8 and 18-135). That's not to say one cannot make money swimming upstream; it's just a smaller market. The actual demand for this glass is probably much less than most expect.