I'm always amazed by the ignorance of people who know nothing about the actual costs of building a camera and think everything is a conspiracy. With the cost of full frame sensors from a wafer production facility they could make a FF camera with the build of a plastic Rebel for maybe $1200-1500. In quantity a FF sensor costs something like $400 each out of the production facility if you buy say 1/2 million of them. An APS-C sensor costs maybe $40 in the same quantity. It is a matter of the number of fully functional sensors ( the yield) that can be produced off one wafer. The cost of the wafer is a measured by the complexity and number of layers and parts that are laid down on it. It is not just the number based on how many fit on a wafer although that is part of the cost. The bigger and more complex the sensor, microprocessor, or whatever the fewer good ones a given wafer produces that actually work. Which is where the 10:1 cost verses yield ratio comes in. Same with MF sensors. The reason they costs $10,000 or more is the yield is very low for even bigger sensors than FF. That is the primary reason MF digital cameras cost way more then their older film versions. A 54 MP digital back for a LF camera used to cost something like $64000 about 5 years ago.
The other is marketing. Camera companies are not in the business of losing money. Otherwise they would all go broke. For every FF camera they sell they ship something like 1000 APS-C cameras. So why would they kill what makes the most money for them? Sure they could sell a stripped down plastic FF camera that could be sold for around what their top of the line full featured APS-C sell for but why would they do that. For one thing if it got popular they would run out of the supply of FF sensors really fast. Then what would they do for income. They have to position FF cameras as being "better" than APS-C (which is getting funnier as APS-C cameras are getting better much faster than FF). When their top of the line FF $6k-$8k pro cameras first came out they lost money on them for years and made it up by promoting the heck out of them and selling lots of expensive lenses to keep the books balanced. Once the sensor yield came up and costs went down they started to make money on them which then allowed them to do sub $3k FF cameras. Maybe if they sold 3-4x more of those cameras we might see sub $1500 FF cameras. but I doubt it.
Many people don't understand that for something like 40 years the big 4 (Canon, Nikon, Minolta, and Pentax) had a blanket patent cross licensing agreement (not sure if it is still in effect). This allowed any of them to further develop an original idea done by another companies R&D agreement. I'm pretty sure it was in response to 2 things, Sigma successfully breaking the patent on the the lens mounts and the us against the world nature of Japanese business. It allowed even the smallest company's R&D the income to develop new ideas. In fact many of Canon's most well known features over the years were built on Pentax foundation patents (eye-controlled focus is one I know of). Many of these patents were beyond the cost of further development by the originators but allowed other Japanese companies to keep at the forefront of camera development. Anybody ever wonder why all these Japanese companies and only these companies so quickly got good AF systems out after the first well designed system, the Minolta came out? Because they shared the data freely among them. As a result all the compaines on the outside looking in disappeared except for Olympus (where are Yashica, Petri, Topcon, Konica, etc. camera makers today).
Anyway do your homework before you spout off about things you apparently don't bother checking out first. Like the X Files the truth is out there you just have to look for it.
Kent Gittings
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