Are you fed up with the ever increasing cost of Canon gear?

jimbrobb wrote:

It seems everything is increasing in price. OK if you bought 2 years ago and now selling but for the majority, like myself, I am puting off buying.

Canon can charge what they want in these scarce times and still make nice profits!

In case you had not noticed, cell phones have killed most of the volume market. The market was down 87% from its peak in 2010 (see figure at the end). Many brands have pulled out or cut way back. Nikon is barely treading water and has stopped making cameras in Japan to lower production costs just to stay afloat in cameras.  Pretty much today, it is a two-horse race with Canon and Sony.

The market is bifurcating into those who just use their cell phones and those willing to pay for much better camera equipment.  With fewer people to sell to, the cost of R&D and manufacturing is higher.

My first DSLR was the 3.1MP APS-C D30 was $1,399US (@2,169 adjusted for inflation); it makes the R5 and R6 look like bargains. Before that, there was film at about $20 for a roll of 36 pictures with film and developing 4x6 prints or about $0.6 each time you pushed the shutter (or about $1 in 2021 dollars).

Granted, technology has gotten cheaper for electronics, but not so much for lenses.  What one has to realize is that non-cell-phone cameras are not a huge market. They don't get the economies of scale as much as they used to. It will be a bigger market than back it the film days, but they are not going to grow the market much by dropping prices significantly.

Even with a lower-end R body and say about 3 "consumer" lenses, you are in the $2,000 to $2,500 price range to get started. Will they get many more people if it was, say, 20% less?

I think some prices will come down as the R&D gets paid off, but that is only if enough people keep buying mirrorless cameras. I wish it were different, but this seems to be the reality.

FM: https://www.statista.com/chart/5782/digital-camera-shipments/