Poll: How much will the R5 cost?

Siobhan_K wrote:

The Bad Photographer wrote:

All answers are in USD sorry

$4999 - $5499. crap, maybe more?

i fear people are placing too much hope in a highly literal, lock-step interpretation of the r5 as a drop-in market replacement for 5d cameras. same "kind" of camera, ergo same customer and same pricing, goes that thinking.

the possible hitch there, i think, is with the "same customer" part of the equation. as ubiquitous as the 5d series has been for professionals, i seem to remember canon selling a whole lot of them--maybe even most of them, by sheer volume?--to "enthusiasts" and affluent casual shooters in 24-120 kits. so many of those buyers are now gone, enjoyably clicking their "pro" iphones and never to return.

so if you're cannon, you gotta be asking: if we price the r5 way up--presumably aiming for institutional and professional buyers who'd amortize a $5499 camera over one to two of their 45 weddings, one or two of their 100 clients next year--is the per-buyer margin profit we gain bigger than whatever we'd get from the few remaining "enthusiast" buyers we price out? we gotta believe canon will be modeling the profit curves. and the answer is clear if the question ends up being: "do we want 10 buyers at $10 profit per camera, or 8 buyers at $2010 profit per camera?"

arriving first at something like 8k, possibly years ahead and in a box with class-leading tech across every other major performance metric--the stars don't align that way every day. i'm skeptical canon will leave that opportunity's bankability on the table. particularly given that they have a complete slate of other, more inexpensive "r" cameras either on the shelves or in the pipeline, from the rp and r to the rumored r6.

I'm not going to debate the price as that's a pretty fruitless exercise, especially around here. What I am interested in is the assertion that "enthusiasts" have gone over to iPhones and the like. Do you have anything to back this up? I ask because, in my experience, this isn't true. All the Rebel users may have switched to phones but the "enthusiast" market is still very much alive and kicking here in the UK. At anything over £4k for the R5 and Canon will lose that market to Sony when the 5DIV gets a bit long in the tooth.