Why can't Canon make a decent full-frame body that's quite a bit cheaper than the 5d Mk II?

[cyr_smith]

<p>Simply put: They can. However they make more money on the other. Haven't you ever been in or been aware of how business works?</p>

[alan_rockwood]

<p>"you can't really stick a MF lens onto a 35mm body. (Though I bet now someone is going to pipe up and say "but there's such-and-such an adapter so you're wrong!" I'm not talking about obscure adapters.)"</p>

<p>OK, I can't resist. There are adapters that let you put Pentacon/Exakta/Kieve medium format lenses onto 35mm cameras. One variation is quite nifty... tilt and shift adapters.</p>

[gatorgums]

<p>The answer , for all of the rest is simple.<br>

They could but they want to make more money.<br>

Sorry to boil it down to such a simple<br>

explaination, but thats about it.</p>

[gatorgums]

<p>Why do you think they are adding " all that crap"?</p>

[gatorgums]

<p>They have a narrow market and they won't<br>

make money if they give 5000 dollars of camera technology<br>

in a cheap body so we can all be happy.<br>

Its a top notch body and features and big cost,<br>

or a mediocre rig that keeps us all whining.<br>

That way they can " improve" the next consumer model<br>

by adding a feature missing on the last one.</p>

 

[peter_wang6]

<p>In terms of hardware, the most expensive parts of a camera body are (1) the sensor (2) the processor and (3) the AF system.</p>

<p>A 35mm sensor is going to be much more expensive than an APS-C sensor. You may think that the cost ratio is proportional to the ratio of the areas of the sensors, but it is even worse than this, since a larger sensor means more wasted/unusable space on a circular wafer, and fewer acceptable chips per wafer even if the defect distribution remains constant. Think of it this way: Suppose you have a (strange) 24" pizza, which is circular, but to be divided into equal squares 1" on a side. Also, suppose this pizza has 5 flies randomly distributed on it. Each fly represents a defect that renders the square it appears in inedible (assume a fly never occupies more than one square. How many edible squares of pizza do you expect to obtain? By contrast, suppose you have the same pizza, with the same number of flies, but are now required to divide it into equal squares 2" on a side. How many edible squares are now obtainable?</p>

<p>Note how the above is completely independent of the pixel density of the sensor. A crystalline defect will render that chip completely unusable, regardless of whether the chip is 10 MP or 20 MP.</p>

<p>That said, once you bother to make a reasonably high pixel density 35mm sensor, you need a fast processor to grab the data, interpret it, and store it. That's why the processors are expensive as well. And with all that processing power, it would be a waste to then strip the camera's firmware down to bare-bones operations.</p>

<p>Now you can see where this is all going. Even if Canon were to remove all the bells and whistles and make a camera that had a 35mm sensor and a processor fast enough to work with it, it costs relatively little to add extra features. You can almost trivially implement it by writing some lines of code. So what purpose does it serve to strip down the camera functionality when it would not significantly bring down the per-unit cost of manufacture? You want a "decent full-frame body"--that in itself is going to cost a lot. You're not really paying for the frills in the 5DmkII. Those come almost for free, as you can see by how Canon has released firmware updates that fundamentally change the behavior of the camera--at no cost to you. First it was the black dot issue, then they added MF in video mode. The video recording capability is nothing in the hardware that would not have been there anyway.</p>