Winsor Crosby wrote:
> From my memory of what was going on then the 300D was released at an
> unbelievable price and there was discussion of Canon finding new ways
> to cut costs in sensor development. A couple of months later they
> dropped the price of the 10D and the explanation gossiped around was
> that the 10D also got the new cheaper sensor in the 300D. It sounds
> like they were not the same and then they were.
>
I assume all that discussion didn't involve anybody form Canon who
actually knew. Dpreview concluded that their performance was the same.
I've nattered on at length before about the economies of mass
production. Suffice it to say that the cost of a component or system can
change radically without any physical change in product or manufacturing
process.
As an example, when a subsystem comes to the end of payoff of the
original start-up cost, like R&D and tooling, the unit cost will drop
considerably. When the subsystem is chosen to be used in a new product
with considerably larger volume than the original, unit cost drops,
sometimes by an amazing amount. If both events occur at about the same
time, the subsystem can become very much lower in cost.
It can even be cheaper to continue production of an item without change
when a cheaper method is found, because of sunk start-up costs. People
who don't understand how manufacturing costs work can come to quite
erroneous conclusions about what manufacturers are doing and why, based
on what they see as common sense.
Moose
==============================================
List usage info: http://www.zuikoholic.com
List nannies: olympusadmin@xxxxxxxxxx
==============================================
|