Quote: Nikon and Canon could put more R&D into in-body stabilization (I’m sure they’ve already put in plenty).
I'd wager that number is zero or very close to it. From a sales point of view, there's no incentive if the other doesn't do it. They're at Nash equilibrium: you have to buy outside the Big 2 if you want this feature, and they don't think many people will do that. (They are right, of course.)
Quote: You’ll miss the lens selection available on the other systems as your shooting style begins to change slightly.
Lens selection is a bit of a red herring. Unfortunately, it's one people fall for often, I suspect. There are holes in the Pentax lens lineup, of course, but a lot of the lenses Canon and Nikon offer are just out of the price range of most purchasers. It's nice to have $5k lenses sports lenses available, but 95% of Canikon buyers probably won't spend more than $2k for a lens, and about 90% will probably stay under $800-1k. A good 75% probably won't go over $500. When you start looking in those price ranges, the difference in selection starts to evaporate quickly.
Some things are missing: a non-plastic mount of a fast 50 (the FA50 f/1.4 is not really in production), an affordable 85mm or so fast lens, and a faster but more affordable ~30mm or so. The DA35 is nice, but they could easily do a f/2 or so version for little money. Both Nikon and Canon have lenses like this around $400.
Quote: And depending on who you are and what programs are available to you, you may miss out on some great behind-the-scenes support through NPS or CPS when you’re in a bind.
I don't think this is worth citing. CPS has low dues--Free for Silver, $100/year for Gold, $300/year for Platinum--but very high buying requirements. You'd need to have and EOS 6D and a 16-35mm f/2.8 to get silver. That's about $3000 right there. Silver gets you almost nothing, and to step up from gold from there, you'd need another $2k or so in lenses (like the $2200 70-200 IS f/2.8, since the f/4 or non-IS version won't get you to the needed points). You're looking at a $5k investment or so to get anything worthwhile from the program.
You'd need to have about 4 or 5 of the consumer grade lenses to qualify for gold. Still, the minimum you're going to spend is $2k to get to silver, about $3k to get to gold.
I doubt most people even know what it is, let alone have interest in it. For the people who *do* use this, it's great, but I probably wouldn't join were it available to Pentax users.
Last edited by MadMathMind; 05-09-2015 at 08:01 AM.