Lack of up to date pancakes in M43?

cba_melbourne wrote:

ahaslett wrote:

• EZGritz wrote:

"I think Olympus are chasing market share and profit."

That's what companies are supposed to do.

One might get the impression from some posts that they should meet everyone's needs, not the needs of their target markets.

Their "target markets" are shrinking rapidly, from the top and from the bottom. And may alone be too small to survive.

They can survive - it depends upon the business model they use and the willingness of their customer base to accept it.

High quality lenses are still made on benches in small production runs.  They are more expensive to make that way but if the margins are better then the stockholding costs are much lower - there is also more flexibility and ability to change course.

The same tooling can presumably make many different lenses once set to do a job.  Tooling up for a new camera body seems like a whole new exercise in complexity.

Camera companies just love the ability to make expensive lenses even if product runs into stock could be as low as 20 units - packaging costs per unit in this case must be hideous - would we accept a big price reduction if they were sold in a plain cardboard box and all manuals and literature were downloadable from the web?

Make up the packaging in lots of 500 and then make the built article in lots of “20”? Possible?  Consumers are not great with logistics - the article just mysteriously appears on a shelf somewhere to be exchanged for quite a lot of money.

Harder to do with camera bodies.  Presumably some market research will give a clue as to the willingness to pay by their consumer base.  Then the R&D if considerable needs to be factored into a recovery price.  This is why the RRP at launch is higher and can reduce after a while.  The quicker the recovery of the R&D surcharge the better and safer it is.

This is a two-edged sword for the consumer - holding back to get a better price means earlier discounts but also means that the device could never recover its R&D and therefore new products would be harder to get to market for various reasons - including convincing financiers to fund it.

Ultimately to get better gear we have to be willing to pay for it - as the market declines the price has to go up and sharper price premiums are necessary to recover that R&D.  I have done similar sums and it is very surprising just how long a relatively small discount will extend the number of units sold necessary to recover the R&D cost.

Of course cameras can also be made on benches in a bespoke manner (like Leica?) and the cost per unit will be quite high.  Smaller production batches made into stock are another option but suitable factory assembly space has to be custom set up and each run will have to have parts bins allocated and staff to be trained.  Therefore longer runs into stock are more economical but more risky.

Whichever way is used smaller demand will mean higher prices.  If that reduces demand further then the price will have to go up again.  In this sort of market lower prices will not work and will only accelerate the demise of your favourite company - a sort of loving to death approach.

There comes a critical sales volume where at any exorbitant retail price, even with a good variety of product sold in small numbers, will not cover the base overheads of the business.

But then Leica seems to survive and is profitable and presumably crazy people buy their gear and mostly Olympus people groan about high prices.  Selling cheap stuff alone is a sure fire way to label M4/3 as “only a poor-man’s system“ and as such it will be bound to die. There is a necessity to cater for the full spectrum - there is nothing particularly wrong with the cheaper lenses that are still available and provide the meat that makes the M4/3 system still have the largest choice of lenses of all the new ML mount systems.

Nobody is forced to buy big expensive lenses - neither on M4/3 nor Canon, nor Nikon nor the rest.