DaSonyGuy
Forum Pro
From their lenses certainly, but I think you will find that Sigma has never been in the camera market for money, well at least from the SD9 onwards.
Sigma wont have made anywhere near as much money from selling cameras, as they have from selling lenses and you should really think of their digital cameras as merely playthings, made to satisfy the photographic whims and desires of Sigma's ruling elite, who are obviously true image quality enthusiasts, funded from profit gleamed from sales of their lenses.
This is pretty obvious when you factor in that the ruling elite of Sigma, alone, in the photographic wilderness, saw the potential of the Foveon X3 sensor when every other camera manufacter around them utterly shunned it, as though it was the sensor equivalent of Gary Glitter, waving a placard saying: "Come here little kiddies, Gary wants you to be in his gang-bang"!
Would you buy a Sigma washing washing machine, especially when it might cost the same as existing known, reliable brands and when it would probably be pretty hard to get hold of?
They would have exactly the same problem as they have now...Not enough money to advertise their cameras in an effective manner, on a global basis, to increase market awareness.
Sigma cameras are largely sold by word of mouth, by the written word, by accident, by chance, by concedence and by eye, but not neccessarily in that order.
So told in story form, the history of the SD range would sound a bit like this:
Once upon a time, a non-Sigma camera owner was looking for a camera with better image quality than his Bayer mush machine could give him. He searched and he searched but to no avail, until he had just about given up all hope of finding one.
Then coincedentaly and quite by accident, he came across some Sigma images which greatly impressed him. He desperately wanted to find out more about the camera that took these impressive images, but he did'nt know where to look as he had never heard of Sigma cameras before.
Then, quite by chance, be came across the Sigma talk forum on DPreview, where he found out more about Sigma cameras by reading and writing lots and lots of words and looking at more great Sigma images, until he could wait no longer...He just had to get one of these amazing Sigma cameras!
But he found that he had to look and look, and look again before he could even find a single camera store that would order one for him and none kept any in stock.
Eventually though, he got one, he fell in love with it and its inherrantly razor sharp images, so much so that he would zeolously defend its honour against all the nasty, mushy, Bayer challengers that stepped up, and he lived happily ever after...Well, at least he mostly lived happily ever after, albeit with the occasional lock-up, noise and colour cast issue!
The end.
