Originally posted by monochrome For $165,000,000 Ricoh got all the Real Estate, Plant & Equipment, the Patents, any intermediate parts like the (rumored to be substantial) inventory of glass blanks, the Inventory of completed cameras and lenses, the Goodwill in the Pentax name and any value in employee processes and procedures. The SMC evaporators had already been fully amortized* and SMC was off patent. FA43 is a 1993 lens; FA77 is a 1999 lens; FA31 is a 2001 lens. The amortization schedule for tooling for lenses is 10 years; the R&D had been recovered.
I'll concede for discussion the cost of glass blanks, which was likely de minimus since Pentax Imaging was sold at Distress pricing. There was therefore little to no value associated with the FA Limiteds in the purchase price aside from Goodwill ascribed to their reputation.
The plan was to discontinue the FA Limiteds once the inventory from the December, 2012 production lot was exhausted. That plan changed when K-1 was greenlighted and all three Limiteds went into a new production batch in February, 2016.. I'd bet, if it was possible to know, we would find the FA Limiteds are the most profitable product Ricoh has in current production - as they are. Changing them would actually reduce the profit margin.
* Recall that Ricoh immediately invested in new evaporators associated with HD. To make that a good business decision they had to have a new, patented coating.
Some things are expensive, some others are not.
Using the new coating => cost = 0 because you need it for other lenses anyway.
Changing the diaphragm / making the lens APD => 0 investment in R&D, cost is the added inventory, but if you need a new batch anyway, that's near 0.
Changing the body / quick shift / adding WR => cost is small, 0 investment in R&D, cost again is mostly added inventory. For WR it may depend of design but 55-300 shown it can be done.
Different AF motor => new focussing group = full lens redesign = a different lens = Quite Expensive but if the lens sell well that's no issue except you have limited resource for that or you need to outsource.
So giving us DFA ltd with quick shift, better coating, new body, WR and rounded apperture blades is no issue. Like the HD DA as long as we keep screw drive. and that is justified if you want to produce a new batch of the lenses anyway and also want to modernize the line.
But there much more to the R&D to the final price of lenses. There the expected volume. Maybe the 55-300 PLM cost in R&D is more than the new DFA50 f/1.4 or a totally new DFA31, but the 55-300 will sell many order of magnitude time more. So the R&D cost per unit is much lower.
There also the price of manufacturing the lens, the target quality/finish, the work involved. I think that the FAltd may need lot of work and that may be also part of their old design. Reality is the current factories are not optimized for theses lenses. Too old design, not optimizations and a design that likely prioritize ultimate quality over cost of manufacturing.
Finally, you typicall sell for as much as you can. Part of the game is to ask for a high price when the thing is quite new. As long as people buy it, why not?
Changing the AF technology is the same as creating new lenses. Theses new lenses may be DFA limited, they may even share the same focal length, design philosophy etc... They not behave the same. Maybe they be better, maybe worse, they'll be different.