Azinko said:
...this is a VERY expensive camera which few of us will ever be able to posess so I for one would like to have seen less presentation along with less price!!
I doubt if simpler packaging would have enabled them to reduce the cost of the product very much. There's nothing especially expensive about the R-D 1's packaging materials; what's unusual is the amount of thought that went into them. As I'm always telling people in my job, "It doesn't cost any more to make a well-designed package than a poorly-designed one!"
Here in the Uk this camera is a staggering £1900,....about USD 3700,....estimated production cost is less than £250 per unit by some sources!!
The difference between UK and US photo-equipment prices has always been a sore point for UK photographers, so it's not as if the R-D 1 is unusual in this regard. I agree that it's frighteningly expensive -- it frightened me when I placed my order, for sure! -- but as I said elsewhere, it's really not much different from a Leica MP or M7 in cost.
I'm very suspicious of that £250 figure as a real guide to the product's profitability. It's (just)
conceivable that the incremental cost of popping another one off the production line is almost that low.
But as others have said, the big cost factors in introducing any new product are development and distribution. Development would have to be a really big expense on the R-D 1, since it had no real precursors on which to base the design; it's not like Canon or Nikon putting a new circuit board in their last-generation digicam and then introducing it as an "all-new" model! And Epson's previous presence in the camera biz was so weak that they must have had to construct a distribution network from scratch.
Spread all those costs over a rumored 25,000-unit production run, and you don't wind up with much excess fat on your cash cow.
Oh, I'm sure they wouldn't have gone into it if they weren't pretty confident that it would make money! But it seems unlikely that greedy Epson execs are revelling over how much they're gouging out of the long-suffering consumer on this item.
(If you want to combine the words "Epson" and "excessive profit margins," you probably should be looking at items such as inkjet printer ink! I recall reading several years ago that Hewlett-Packard got into the inkjet printer business
solely to make money on ink sales!)
