Originally posted by Flubber I think you're right, luftfluss.
They're consciously marketing it as a flagship. With that title needs to follow ambitious performance, and as a consequence ambitious pricing. In a sense, it's a psychological thing. If you price it too cheaply, then people will not take it seriously, and will not look at it as a flagship/premium model.
It sounds odd, but it's true: sometimes when you raise the price of a product, it's easier to sell it than when it's cheap. Psychology plays a big role.
With that said, I'm frankly amazed at how well they're keeping this thing under wraps - especially compared to the competition, who face detailed leaks all the time. Apart from a few selectively chosen details, we know almost nothing about this camera, which makes me suspect that they may have something groundbreaking up their sleeves that they want to hide from their competitors.
I decided long ago that I was going to pre-order/buy the K-new, and after spending a bit of time considering it against the K-1, I've fallen back on my initial decision to buy the K-new. It's just the wait that is getting to me, and making me impatient. I need to relax.
That can also backfire. Cadillac tried to shift from being the brand of upper middle class old people, to competing with the German luxury brands of BWM, Mercedes and Audi. They made their cars angular, and much more performance-oriented. They won many magazine reviews for performance sports sedans and coupes. And they specifically said that they were the equal of the Germans, so they were pricing their cars like the Germans. They weren't going to be the less-expensive domestic version, they were going toe-to-toe with those brands. The Cadillac ATS was priced about the same as an A4 or a 3-series.
And what happened? The Germans had the reputation and the prestige and are still happily selling M cars and AMGs and S- and RS-models. While Cadillac has retired the ATS and CTS, replaced them with something else, and has mostly shifted to SUVs after not selling sedans and coupes as well as the Germans, even in the US.
---------- Post added 09-15-20 at 09:05 AM ----------
Originally posted by pqberger I also wonder, when do we hit the point when upgrades are hardly worth doing, or at least, infrequently. I remember the humble PC beginnings and the rate of improvements early on meant that regular upgrades were nearly a necessity. Now when computers are pretty fast already the improvements seem minimal. When something already happens quickly, to make it 25% faster hardly seems worth forking out thousands of dollars.
At least with cameras the requirements for the basic operating system and functionality doesn't creep up over time. Especially if you're locked into Windows (say, at work) the operating system consumes ever more resources, especially with major upgrades like Win10, and the security apparatus many companies require is just as demanding. So just to do things as quickly as you did 10 years ago requires vastly more processing power, memory, etc. My K-30 works just as well and as quickly as it did eight years ago when it was new.