Steve Jolly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >Mark Roberts wrote: >> There's an inexorable trend for sensors to increase in size and decrease >> in price. > >A 24x36mm chunk of silicon wafer will always be a 24x36mm chunk of >silicon wafer, and there's no real reason that I can see to expect the >price of silicon to plummet. Yields will probably go up slightly, but >CCDs aren't pushing the limits of feature size in the way that CPUs are, >so I wouldn't expect that to have much of a price impact. > >The general reason why digital devices keep plummeting in price is >because advancing technology allows them to be made smaller, and smaller >is cheaper. Fix the size of the device and you lose that advantage. >You can still get "economies of scale" of course - up to a point, the >cost of your product decreases if you can sell it to more people.
Cost reduction will come from three factors (in increasing order of significance): Improvement in yield Economies of scale New, less expensive, manufacturing processes Canon has been hammering away on #3 and their success has helped achieve #2. Everyone else is lagging behind for now. Just wait until others begin to catch up. We ain't seen nuthin' yet. -- Mark Roberts Photography and writing www.robertstech.com
