woodyspedden
New member
I think you have to look at how long a life the S2 will have to utilize the R&D expenditures.Just a thought:
if one assumes $50 mil for development of whole system, with lenses, perhaps....
- manuf costs for the camera and a lens at about $5k (min, assume development work solved all initial prototype issues, its just straight production now)
- soft costs per camera (distribution, adverts, admin) @ $5k per camera
You'd have to sell.... 5,000 units to break even.
This doesn't include anything for extra lens sales, but maybe those profits would go into continuing R&D.
Any thoughts?
Items such as Auto Focus, body design, firmware etc will not have to be redone entirely over the lifetime of the product. Incremental engineering to continuously upgrade the product will not be close to 30 people.
The most serious question in my mind is what it will take to use a newer, higher Mpx sensor. I believe that at least one, if not two, sensor iterations will be required over the lifetime of the product. The competition is moving fast (now at 80 Mpx already!) and Leica will not be able to stand still IMHO. I suspect that new sensors will require new firmware at the least but, again, nothing close to 30 people to implement.
This is of course speculation on my part. So far i am very very happy with the file quality from the 37Mpx sensor currently in the product. I print a max size of 24x36 and do not usually have to do very large croppings. Those who are printing 40x60 or larger and who do serious cropping may need a much larger number of pixels.
Just my thoughts. I have no information so treat this as one man's speculation
woody