48889cb8@news.povray.org...
> Companies realise that option 2 is likely to make them much more profit, 
> you get sales from all the people who couldn't afford $150 before, plus 
> you get sales from people who think that because it's $200 it must be 
> better than a $150 camera from another company, and obviously it's better 
> than your $125 you are selling.

Some of the crippled features only exist in uncrippled form in the high-end, 
much more expensive SLRs, that have specific hardware features (namely the 
abiility to have different and much better lenses and the SRL system itself) 
that cater to different people. Both lines of products do not compete with 
each other: they're different markets (with a small line of "bridge" cameras 
filling the gap). If Canon had left RAW support in the point-and-shoot 
digicams, that would not have prevented power users to buy SLRs.

In the end it surely comes down to money and I'm pretty sure that they ran 
simulations about this, but the true rationale still looks like real 
marketing to me: Canon judged that a digicam belongs to a market segment 
that doesn't need (or even understand) RAW support and other fancy high-end 
features, so they took those features off of the list to keep their product 
lines neatly separated.

G.

Post a reply to this message