dilbert said:
TWI by Dustin Abbott said:
Just my 2 cents, but I think that Canon really needs to stop charging such ridiculous initials MSRP's for their new lens.
$2499 for 24-70II to well under $2000 in just over a year.
$1699 for 24-70 f/4 to under a $1000 street price (as cheap as $899) in less than a year.
$849 for 35mm f/2 IS to $549 in about a year.
Etc... (and don't even get started on the EOS M)
I've heard the arguments that early adopters pay the premium. Fine, but when a clear trend emerges that new products start well above market value and reach their true value in a year or less some light bulbs start going off, and that core, important audience starts closing their wallets and waiting. I just think it is a bad business practice. Yes, market forces often drive the value of new goods down over time, but, in the case of the EOS and the 24-70 f/4 you are talking about near 50%.
I'm a value conscious shopper. I personally am not inclined to buy any new Canon product within 6 months of release because I fear that my investment is going to be wasted. Premium lenses are often exceptional at holding their value, but try telling that to someone who is trying to sell a year old 24-70 variant when new prices have dropped by $600+.
The Tamron 24-70 entered the market at a $1299 price point. Current price is about $1049 for the Canon version, although the Nikon is still at about $1299 for some reason. That is what I consider more like typical market forces. One of the advantages in the past to buying a Canon over a third party was the conventional wisdom that the Canon would have a higher resale value. But what if that advantage is removed? I bought my Tamron for $1149 by negotiating and shopping around. I can sell it for at least $900, possibly more. But at worst I have lost $250. If I had paid $2499 for the 24-70MKII and was looking at a market of, say, $1800, to sell it, I think I would be pretty ticked.
In conclusion: if Canon does release a new 24-70mm f/2.8 IS, I think it pricing it over $2500 is a mistake.
You came to the wrong conclusion.
Your conclusion should have been this: I care more for how much I can sell my lens for than the photographs I create with it.
That's not really a fair assessment. For those of us who aren't making money off of our gear, the tendency for the price to plummet after a year or two is a serious concern even if we have no intention of ever selling it. When used lenses drop in price, new lenses also tend to drop in price. As a result, when choosing whether to buy a lens, rather than asking how much extra value we'll get from owning a lens, we're forced to ask whether the extra value we'll get from owning the lens over the next few months is worth half the price of the lens. If it isn't, we should wait a year and buy it then.
In practice, that means that it never makes sense to buy any lens until it has been on the market for at least a year or two unless you're actively making a lot of money with your lenses, and it rarely makes sense even if you are. This makes new lenses a much tougher sell, and pretty much shuts enthusiasts out of the new lens market entirely.
If Canon stabilized the prices a bit by setting the SRP closer to the wholesale price, the used lens price would have less effect on the new lens price, so the price of new lenses wouldn't collapse as much, early adopters would pay considerably less, late adopters might pay slightly more, and early adoption would become accessible to a much broader market, which would mean that the R&D costs of designing a new lens would pay for themselves sooner, and we'd see a more rapid roll-out of new lenses.
Of course, the story is different for bodies, because they're constantly coming up with new, improved versions of those. We expect body prices to come down whenever a replacement rears its ugly head. But there's no good reason for that to happen with lenses when they aren't getting replaced with newer versions. Such drops indicate that there's too much dealer markup initially, and that the prices are being artificially inflated for no good reason.
Unless, of course, Canon sets the initial MSRP ridiculously high because they can't handle the demand, in which case they need to get their act together.
