Manufacturers are in the business to sell stuff for a profit, not to make it more affordable for the 1% that might care.
The Canon technical R&D people are ALREADY working on exactly the sort of stuff I'm talking about: diffractive optics, aspherics, etc. This is not some wild goose chase side project that would distract them from their main profit makers. It's just capitalizing on whatever they are already researching with a few more iterations to capture a larger market share.
What I'm suggesting does not require any huge industrial research initiatives or other major up front costs compared to other lenses. It involves designing some already existing technology into a metal tube and then sending it to the factory. And there are no electronics, remember, so it really is pretty much a metal tube with a focuser (trivial to design when there aren't electronics in the way) and an iris aperture (similarly). This should be absolute child's play for companies like this and take almost no resources compared to the huge upfront costs already invested in factories and tech.
You're acting as if physical lens design is somehow the bottleneck at companies like Nikon or Canon. It's, um, not. They could probably roll out 50 new lenses next year if they felt like it.
And since lens design is such a tiny marginal cost to their whole business, they should be able to justify it even with tiny increases to profits. In other words, if redesigning a simimlar lens without the electronics only represents a 5% marginal increase in overall costs, then it can be justified with 5% of normal revenue increase. And if it snags a new customer to your brand (niche folks), then you can justify it for WAY WAY less, because they'll also be buying other things most likely.
If that weren't true, do you think Canon would be selling any $2500 tilt shift lenses? No, they wouldn't. These are vastly more complex to design than a standard fixed manual lens, and appeal to a probably even smaller market (I for one have a few friends who commonly shoot manual, and don't know anybody who owns a non-lensbaby tilt). Yet they sell multiple versions of them.
One additional note on the high price items or luxury items. Manufacturers usually want or need to maintain that status.
I quite understand and agree. But please note that I'm not suggesting they make cheap, terrible lenses. Just because it's manual doesn't mean it can't have world class near-perfect optics, weather sealing, magnesium body, whatever you want in a luxury lens. In fact, the whole point is that by not having electronics, all the rest of the stuff can be even MORE luxury than normal.
Just... different. Which doesn't hurt a company's high class reputation at all.
The answer is profoundly simple: They won't sell enough of them to make the investment, on their part, worthwhile.
It might be that, but like I was musing above, it's hard to imagine how the marginal R&D cost of such a type of lens would amount to much of anything at all to Canon or Nikon. I mean, without electronics, we're talking maybe a month's work for like one guy to design it, and then some testing and industrial optimization.
And the marginal production cost is less irrelevant, because if you make 10,000 units, you only pay for 10,000 lenses worth of materials in exchange for your 10,000 lenses of revenue. Setting up a factory would add overhead to this, but I'm imagining they have fairly flexible and automated assembly lines for a standard tube lens design.
it would make much more sense to me if they were choosing not to for
marketing reasons of some sort. More similar to the quote above this one about "luxury name brand street cred" but not exactly from the luxury angle. Something similar perhaps, though, about how they want to present themselves or something. But I can't quite put my finger on it.
HA at comparing AF and aperture selection to IS. Even on a manual lens, focus + aperture selection must eventually be translated to just rotating a single dial. figuring out how to actuate that single mechanism isn't rocket science. can you conceive of a single dial that would handle IS?
Uh yes, actually. IS is not nearly as complicated as you seem to be making it out to be. The core concept is like a high school science fair project level of complexity. It's basically a lens with some magnets and then another ring of magnets around it, and they turn on the magnets in the opposite direction that is detected by angle sensors, in 2 dimensions. The end, pretty much.
It is in a very real sense, a sort of electronic single "ring" that is spun to whatever the opposite of the resultant vector of motion is at any given time. Pretty much a 1-dimensional actuation if you think in polar coordinates, very similar to aperture or focus.
There's really no need for pros, either [to manually focus].
The idea of the thread isn't that MF is better. It's pretty clearly not, on average. It's that it's cheaper, and not usually strictly necessary. It's nice to have the option to not pay for unnecessary creature comforts sometimes, and choose performance instead.
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