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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

> I guess the engineering for cameras that nice has fairly high "minimum cost" that can't easily be brought down by industrialization?

It may be a value thing. Why would you sell a $500 toy to the consumer market who are un-fun customers to deal with, if you could sell the same thing to a professional for $5000 and they won’t even blink because they can leverage that same tool into $500,000 of revenue?

Plus at the $5000 price you can afford to have proper customer support, good service department, and all the other stuff that professionals value. You can make an actually better product even if the tech itself is the same.

And you don’t need to play silly expensive consumer marketing games. Focus on making great cameras and the professionals will market among themselves.

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Totally fair, I guess I was hoping it would be like servers.

New servers are also super expensive, and don't directly market to consumer, but their used value is basically nothing. You can buy a used server on eBay, even with relatively nice specs for a consumer, for less than a grand, often substantially less than a grand (mine was $150 for 128gb of RAM and 24 cores).

It doesn't appear that pro-grade cameras fall the same way though.

> It doesn't appear that pro-grade cameras fall the same way though

I wonder if cameras are just too durable and don’t need to be upgraded as often?

Even a consumer camera will last you roughly forever in my experience. I still use a DSLR from 2015 that works great and does everything I need.

Yeah, I think that's the thing. The reason that companies liquidate servers for so cheap is because nearly any large company that buys a server would always benefit from a server that's any amount better. e.g. If you can push 10% more trades, that roughly correlates directly to profits, so the relative cost of "just buying a new server" is nothing.

A nice 4k (and especially 8k) camera, on the otherhand, is likely "good enough" for a lot longer. A studio can probably get a lot more value out of a 10 year old Red One than a trading company can get from a 10 year old server, so there's not really the constant need to upgrade your camera every year or two.

Also, it would be worth considering that a new camera would (I assume) require a bit more learning on the operators part, since there might be subtle differences between color grading and compression and the like. A server, on the other hand, is somewhat standardized; Linux is basically Linux, if you're running the same OS you're getting basically the same experience, so the process of upgrading is pretty easy.

Nikon d850, their top model and one of the best slr's ever made came out in 2017. My most used digital camera is a Canon 5d from 2005, I prefer it over my much newer Fuji XT3 most of the time because of its colors. (And one of my most used analog cameras is a 1939 Leica)

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