Lens logic

Fri13 wrote:

Astrotripper wrote:

And I think those upcoming lenses have a chance of doing that. The 100-400 and 300/4 are both targeted at somewhat different audience. And hopefully, they will be reasonably priced. With some luck, their arrival will grow the MFT user base that wants/needs super telephoto lenses. Once there are more people using and needing toys like that, you can think of making more advanced lenses, aimed at really advanced and demanding users.

Something like that.

Waiting customers to come to you when you are selling nothing to them, doesn't bring you anyway closer to get their money to get product out to sell it to them.

You need to get investors and just make a first small batch of the products that you want to be selling and then sell those and start making more batches to be sold.

That is how the business works, you need the money first to start it.

That's fine and dandy, but when the cost of bringing that product to the market is millions of dollars, you'd better have an actual market for it.

And there is probably no viable market for $4000 lenses for MFT system. It's really that simple. People that are willing and actually can spend that kind of money, probably already own such lenses for other systems. Those few in MFT that would actually buy it are not enough and it would end up being a loosing proposition for Olympus.

Of course, they can always sink money to try to create this market from nothing. By why not first release a lens that a lot of people will actually buy and are waiting for?

You can't just make a very expensive premium super telephoto zoom and say: "hey, look what we have here, drop your heavy stuff and come to us". Now, if they would be able to do that for <$2k, that would be another matter.

Anyway, if we're talking about bringing new people into the system. For most people, it makes no sense to buy into a different system for a single lens. It works both ways, actually. I'd love to have a Sigma 20mm f/1.4 and an FF body to match, but I'm not going to spend that kind of money for a single body and lens, no matter how good it is. I'd rather pay $1000 for native f/1.0 or f/1.2 UWA from Olympus. It's not going to be the same, but it will be cheaper and I won't have to deal with bulky DSLR, which I really dislike.

You really need to offer a comprehensive solution. And building that simply takes time. I'd love to see Olympus shift gears and bring those lenses faster, but what can we do.

In the meantime, that 90-250/2.8 will work on E-M1, and you can always pair it up with a teleconverter. So yeah, if you want an expensive, high quality super-telephoto zoom, it's actually available if you can afford it.