Adam Maas wrote: >The costs aren't due to limited supply of >lenses compared to demand, but due to the inherently higher costs of >doing short production runs and higher per-unit profit requirements to >make the product viable.
Mike J wrote very cogently about this just a couple of weeks ago: http://theonlinephotographer.blogspot.com/2006/09/smart-and-dumb-prime-lenses-103_16.html "Imagine that it costs $250,000 to develop a lens design it, engineer the parts, construct and test a prototype, etc. Cost of manufacture, above and beyond the development cost, is then $100 per unit. If you know you're going to sell 250,000 units, then the cost of each lens is $101. But if you know you're only going to sell 5,000 units, the cost of the same lens is $150. Now imagine that you don't know how many units you're going to sell you might sell 5,000, or you might sell 1,000 or even fewer. Your break even cost could be as high as $350 per unit." -- Mark Roberts Photography & Multimedia www.robertstech.com 412-687-2835 -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
