Originally posted by Aristophanes The market for a non-AF, "bare bones" FF system camera would be measured in the thousands to very low tens if thousands total sales over the lifetime of the body/sensor.
By the time all the engineering, design, manufacturing instruction, assembly training, separate supply chain was costed in, the low volume would mean a very high price. Not a lower price.
Makes no sense when you can simply manual focus on the current bodies. And because the FF sensor has such large files it requires big silicon and pipes which makes for a largish body, especially because SLR mounts have to hold some pretty weighty lenses. The RX-1 is small and loses a lot if SLR functionality and it is $2,800. There I your baseline price for losing market.
By shrinking the market you raise overhead per unit. Most of the components are pretty cheap as is save the FF sensor, so you save nothing. By losing volume customers you' drive the price up to D800 levels, RX-1 levels. Features don't really add much cost. The killer for FF is the low yield on the silicon which starts at 2.5x APS ideally, but is closer to 4x less per unit. When you factor in the added processing, buffers, pipes, etc. FF under the hood is about 6-8x APS. That means a baseline FF sensor and circuit board alone costs about as much as a K-50 in its entirety. And I am being generous to FF. The K-50 price point has magnitudes more market reach. As camera bodies pop over $1,000 per demand volume falls off a cliff, so really the only way to make up for volume is price. And the only way to justify that price is features.
I wasn't thinking about removing AF entirely; just making manual useable (split prism?) with the intent of accessing a market that wants FF, high quality, but not really all the bells and whistles that can get in the way of shooting. Something that would serve a market that doesn't want a $3500 FF, but wants FF at a more attractive entry price. It wouldn't need 6 fps, movie mode, or digital filters. Not a body for the soccer mom market that never gets out of auto mode, but an informed market (say schools and their students, enthusiasts, pros) that want a path that says they can invest in FF glass now and upgrade the body later if they decide they need advanced features.
I was actually thinking in terms of
increasing the market size, not shrinking it. I don't claim to have the answers, just hoping we could identify what minimum feature set could do that.
If it turned out that it was more like a $2000 price but a smaller niche market, the other way to justify a slightly higher price is quality. Metal body, sealed, perfect ergonomics, and a shooting style where the camera 'gets out of the way' of the photographer. I've heard a few pros make the comment that they chose Nikon for those reasons; they felt the camera just faded away and let them focus on creative shooting, as opposed to Canon where they felt like the ergonomics/features are always in the way or working against them.