GFX100, a 15 fold increase of value compared to an XF IQ350 (per Bernard)

[eronald]

It is my belief - founded on my 40 year old education in IC design, that chips are priced by surface. (The root cause of this is that defects follow a Poisson statistic).

Hence the cost of a 50Mp or a 100MP 44x33 chip do not differ vey significantly.

Which makes me think that the cost to Fuji of a 44x33 chip is well under $1K, and makes the pricing of the GFX100 completely incomprehensible, a more reasonable expectation of pricing would be somewhere north of $5K where we find the other "pro" Nikon and Canon bodies ... and the Hasselblad X1DII.

I think Fuji may have been indulging in a bit of puffery with the overlarge and shiny booster body and noisy launch PR, and we can expect some quick steps downwards as soon as the first wave of impulse buying subsides.

The positioning of the GFX100 in the Fuji line, as a straight jump up from APS-C is very smart. However it becomes less clever when the price differential between APS-C flagship and the crop MF flagship is 4x rather than 2x.

I intend no disrespect to Fuji, nor to the GFX100 which seems an excellent photographic device, but the discussion of pricing has always been a prerogative of the consumer.

Edmund

[DP]

chips are priced by surface. (The root cause of this is that defects follow a Poisson statistic).

cost is by surface, price is by demand (vs supply, whatever)... it is not an essential prescription drug to try to regulate it.

[DanielStone]

I never see Ferrari, Aston Martin, or Rolls Royce offering discounts publicly.
It's a tool, and they can ask whatever they want, just like photographers who shoot professionally can ask what they feel is fair, that doesn't mean the customer might like the number quoted

The market will decide if their MSRP pricing is "fair". If it's not, and units are slower to move than deemed justifiable by the dealers worldwide, they'll discount in time.

[billthecat]

Fuji appears to be giving a very reasonable price point on their cameras. I would gather that they are pricing not what the market could handle but a conservative profit over their costs. Of course this is an opinion since I don't know all the costs. We know Hassy wanted to sell their X1D at a higher price point.

Bill

[BernardLanguillier]

The GFX100 isn’t cheap but the excellent GF lenses are a total bargain compared to anything else in “MF”.

Try to compare them to Leica S glass for a good laugh. And I personally think that the Fuji lenses are the better ones performance wise. Comparable Hasselblad lenses are also much more expensive.

It’s true that Fuji probably generates a healthy margin per body sold, but there is significant R&D investment here with first ever MF pdaf, first ever MF IBIS, a platform supporting 5fps at 100mp... that has to be accounted for.

Think of the margins P1 is doing per body with the Iq4-150 if you only think about BOM costs.

Cheers,
Bernard

[BobShaw]

It is my belief - founded on my 40 year old education in IC design, that chips are priced by surface. (The root cause of this is that defects follow a Poisson statistic).
Hence the cost of a 50Mp or a 100MP 44x33 chip do not differ vey significantly.

I would have though that twice as many pixels would make it twice as complex. Anyway,
What is the price? I thought that it was around $US10K.

Cost has little bearing on price. The price is what the manufacturer thinks that people will pay.

[hubell]

The Fuji GFX 100 is “absurdly overpriced “? This is a joke, right?

[eronald]

The Fuji GFX 100 is “absurdly overpriced “? This is a joke, right?

Hubell,
 
Seen by an engineer, Sony's A7RIII, has substantially the same functionality, namely a drop-in fully-digital Sony sensor part, IBIS, functional eyefocus, and various video modes, and costs $2800 or so on Amazon. I have been told the Sony is a very usable camera, although I don't own one.

The Fuji may have a denser pixel pitch and slightly larger 33x44 mm $800 sensor that needs to be bought from the competition, while the Sony has a $250 sensor from their own fab, but  I see no real functional difference between the A7R3 and the GFX100 design apart from scale. I'm not even sure the buffer is much larger in MB as the frame rate is lower. Sure the IBIS and body frame are scaled up from the Fuji APS-C versions, but the Sony has IBIS too, for a "24x36" sensor that is not that much smaller in area (or weight) than crop MF, and Sony too has solved its video heat issues.

My take on this is that we are seeing deliberate oversizing and "Boombox Pricing" from Fuji. Convince them that because you built it larger they need to pay more. There's nothing wrong with this, I'm just pointing out that it's happening. You wanna buy it, you'll get an excellent product, albeit at an inflated pricepoint.


Sony A7Riii ===> GFX100
24x36mm ===> 33x44mm
$2900 ===> $10 000
Absurd Overpricing.

Edmund

UPDATE: I think there is one part which is probably expensive and bought from a specialist manufacturer (Seiko, Copal?), which is the oversize shutter that accomodates the large sensor and space for IBIS movement. It is interesting that apart from a comment about moderate noise, no mention is made of the shutter or of the shutter wind mechanism in any of the videos or marketing materials I have seen. I wonder whether the part is the same as used for the Phase XF body, which I believe is sized to 645 but is probably designed for a mirror box environment.

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

It is my belief - founded on my 40 year old education in IC design, that chips are priced by surface.

Indirectly. It's more about yield (which drops a lot as size increases, and as structures shrink).

Hence the cost of a 50Mp or a 100MP 44x33 chip do not differ very significantly.

There's more to launching a new product that uses a sensor. Commitments for numbers of sensors to be purchased, and the risks involved is but one. Designing a platform that uses such a sensor and is ready for future developments, is another.

Focusing on a single component, the sensor, is not a realistic way of looking at it.

Cheers,
Bart

[Ken Doo]

My son when he was in middle-school would say, "It's a business, not a charity." 

 

The GFX remains one of the best bang-for-the-buck camera systems today, imho.  Right behind your cell phone 

[eronald]

Indirectly. It's more about yield (which drops a lot as size increases, and as structures shrink).
Bart

Bart,

 Of course you are right. It is about yield. But in the end when a process is running and being commercially exploited, yield for a die is mainly dependent on surface of the die. For those who are interested in a survey, here is a fairly recent set of course materials.

http://courses.ieor.berkeley.edu/ieor130/yield_models_rev6.pdf

The topic of sensor prices has been debated at length on the forum, but again it is difficult to set a "true" price on a chip, because prototypes are expensive, production at the end of the yield curve is cheap, the capital investment on the equipment is huge, but once it is running you amortize it, and in the case of Japan, manufacturers presumably have extensive reserve capacity to offset the impact of earthquakes, and luckily there have been no major disasters lately. I believe now of the order of $1K for the sensor in the GFX100 is what is getting paid, maybe someone else here has datapoints for another current commercial sensor of the same surface eg. the ones used by Leica.


As for other factors that go into pricing a product, I believe they are complex and dependent on marketing factors, such as for instance a desire to avoid a "flagship" product cannibalising a cash cow or vice versa, and the need for a flagship product to exist at least on paper to establish branding.

Branding explains why very expensive Haute Couture shows are regularly held in Paris for clothes that will only sell in single digits, but which will establish branding for ready to wear, accessories, cosmetics and perfume.

So maybe we are just looking at an exercise in branding. My local FNAC has a Nikon D5 and a Canon 1DxII in a display case, and a Fuji GFX50 - it will now have a GFX100 - I believe such static camera bodies are called "display queens".

Edmund

[fotagf8]

I believe Adobe went to the subscription model three or so years ago.  At the time, its stock was trading at around $50 a share.  Today, the stock price opened at around $300 a share.  Many photographers on forums asserted that this was the end of Adobe, and that they would never subscribe.  Proof that the vocal people on web forums often don’t know what they are talking about.  I don’t think Fuji cares what a few vocal photographers on forums think about its business pricing strategy.  They undoubtedly spent a lot of time doing market research.

That is not to say that Fuji doesn’t care what photographers think about their products.  In fact, it appears that Fuji listened carefully to what photographers had to say about the GFX 50.  $10,000 may seem like a lot if you just focus on pixel count.  But when you throw in image stabilization, greatly improved auto focus, better ISO performance, and some seemingly useful design changes, this looks like a  very desirable camera.  I suspect Fuji will do quite well with it.

[eronald]

I believe Adobe went to the subscription model three or so years ago.  At the time, its stock was trading at around $50 a share.  Today, the stock price opened at around $300 a share.  Many photographers on forums asserted that this was the end of Adobe, and that they would never subscribe.  Proof that the vocal people on web forums often don’t know what they are talking about.  I don’t think Fuji cares what a few vocal photographers on forums think about its business pricing strategy.  They undoubtedly spent a lot of time doing market research.

That is not to say that Fuji doesn’t care what photographers think about their products.  In fact, it appears that Fuji listened carefully to what photographers had to say about the GFX 50.  $10,000 may seem like a lot if you just focus on pixel count.  But when you throw in image stabilization, greatly improved auto focus, better ISO performance, and some seemingly useful design changes, this looks like a  very desirable camera.  I suspect Fuji will do quite well with it.

You are quite right - now that they have achieved software lock-in Adobe  seem likely to raise prices and revenues more quickly, as the value provided to the user is supplemented by the cost of any attempt to escape.

One of my friends was CIO of a 2000 person site for a computer consultancy. He ran the whole backend on Linux. A management decision was made to move to Microsoft, and the salesman came in and said "you will pay us $500K up front". So my friend asked "why?" and the guys said "our licensing system is deliberately set up to be opaque, you will never be able to prove that you are not in breach of contract, whatever you do. So you just pay what we say." They did.

BTW, I'm sure you're right about the Fuji's many desirable properties, but maybe you could explain which one of those is innovative, and not provided by the A7R3, apart of course the size?


Edmund

[BernardLanguillier]

I suspect Fuji won’t be able to build according to demand for 6 months to a year.

I also don’t think that a 60mp Sony a7rIV or 70 mp Nikon Z9 will reduce the desirability of the GFX100 a bit.

The only possible threat could have been a more compact 100mp X2D, but Hasselblad has just told us at the best possible timing we won’t be getting that so the road is wide open for Fuji. If I were the Fuji marketing director I’d send 100 bottles of the best champain to Sweden because there really couldn’t have been a better move to remove any possible doubts in the mind of prospect GFX100 buyers.

Cheers,
Bernard

[hasselbladfan]

I saw it at B&H for 9,999 usd, which as a businessman does not look so "absurd" to me.

1. They are by far the cheapest 100MP camera on the market (vs Phase1 / Hasselblad).
2. They have a great range of modestly priced lenses (vs the same competitors, Leica).
3. They know they will get some competition in 2020, which will push the price to 7-8k range (see Pentax example years ago).
4. They know most people don't need a 100MP, so we are talking at best 1,000-2,000 cameras per year (I have no clue, maybe even less).
5. They know whatever they do, some people will complain on Lulu.

So, let's take the extra bucks and run.

[Endeavour]

One of my friends was CIO of a 2000 person site for a computer consultancy. He ran the whole backend on Linux. A management decision was made to move to Microsoft, and the salesman came in and said "you will pay us $500K up front". So my friend asked "why?" and the guys said "our licensing system is deliberately set up to be opaque, you will never be able to prove that you are not in breach of contract, whatever you do. So you just pay what we say." They did.

lol, run us through that one again

[hubell]

I suspect Fuji won’t be able to build according to demand for 6 months to a year.

I also don’t think that a 60mp Sony a7rIV or 70 mp Nikon Z9 will reduce the desirability of the GFX100 a bit.

The only possible threat could have been a more compact 100mp X2D, but Hasselblad has just told us at the best possible timing we won’t be getting that so the road is wide open for Fuji. If I were the Fuji marketing director I’d send 100 bottles of the best champain to Sweden because there really couldn’t have been a better move to remove any possible doubts in the mind of prospect GFX100 buyers.

Cheers,
Bernard

One thing I am sure about is that Hasselblad knows its business better than any of us do, and that's why they did what they did with the X1D Mark II. The dramatic expansion of the medium format digital market that Fuji and Hasselbad achieved with the GFX 50S/R and the X1D was primarily about moving advanced (and in many cases not so advanced) amateur photographers from their APS-C and FF systems. AFAIK, well over 70% of the GFX units were sold to this group. What changed to incentivize them to move up? Two things.  Primarily price, and secondarily the smaller size/weight of the systems compared to conventional medium format digital systems. The Fuji GFX 100 is a completely different proposition. $10k v. $4-5k for a GFX 50S/R. And, it's relatively huge in size and weight compared to a GFX 50S/R. Against that backdrop, what Hasselblad did with the Mark II was potentially brilliant. It's all about the price! You can now have a brand new Hasselblad X1D Handmade in Sweden for $5700, pretty close to the Fuji GFX. And, the size and weight advantages were preserved the Mark II, with a huge new LCD screen to show off that smartphone-type User Interface and a very much improved EVF thrown in for good measure. Nobody saw that price drop coming.
So, that Fuji Marketing Director responsible for the GFX 100 may be happy, but the one resonsible for the GFX 50S/R may not be so happy. They no longer own the end of the market for price sensitive buyers.
BTW,  I personally wanted an X2D with the 100MP Sony sensor, but I am an outlier in the overall market, just as you are, Bernard.

[eronald]

eronald = gilet jaune

Slobodan,

 I like your logo "When everyone thinks the same, nobody thinks".

 I think everyone in this discussion has a point.

Edmund

[Christopher]

Well there is still the point of X1D lenses are much more expensive, without any benefit. (Except the 1% who need LS for flash.)

I personally don’t think the GFX100 is overpriced. Certainly I would have preferred 7-8k, however, the system in total (lenses) is so much more affordable than anything else and it beats anything else. I have no doubts it will be superior to any recent gen cameras from Phase or Hassi.

Im also sure we will see a 100MP S version without IBIS around 6k sooner rather then later.

[eronald]

Well there is still the point of X1D lenses are much more expensive, without any benefit. (Except the 1% who need LS for flash.)

Actually there may be a negative benefit as I have heard they make harsh patterns when closed down.

Edmund