Olympus abdicating entry level ILS market?

007peter wrote:

Impulses wrote:

007peter wrote: Canon is sacrificing the profit margin on a SL1 to locked the new user into their System, away from Micro43, or other mirrorless competitor. @$324, I admit, I find it nearly irresistible.

I'm not disputing your point because I actually agree with you, a race to the bottom isn't remotely profitable for any of the smaller players... That being said, Oly's camera division hasn't exactly been doing fine, financially speaking.

The entire point of Low-End isn't to make money, but to maintain growth.

Many of us begin Micro43 journey with a cheap Olympus E-PL1, E-PL2, E-M1, E-M2. It is the entry-level-camera that attract new users into the fold: hence the growth. Then later, you up-sell them to higher end advance models like EM10, EM1, GH4.

Without entry-level-camera to entice new users into the fold, M43 base will dwindling. Going premium is a profitable short-term solution, but a long term disaster in the making.

Which users do you want to attract. Right now Olympus aims at DSLR users willing to switch to mirrorless. The old PL- and PM-models were aimed at Point-and-shoot users willing to upgrade. That is a small group to target. Most of them seem to be happy with smartphone photography these days. And on the high end of P&s-land the competition and product choices are better than ever (RX100 3, RX10,  FZ1000, LX100, G7X, G1X, X30 to name a few). So going after the upper end of the market while offering last years model as a cheaper point of entry is a sensible approach. There is no big market for cheap entry-level ILCs with all the great choice of high end p&s plus cheap DSLRs.