Why that Canon lens costs $5,500
Canon offers an online tour of its lens manufacturing and assembly plant, letting everyone appreciate just why those high-end lenses are so pricey.
- Shankland covered the tech industry for more than 25 years and was a science writer for five years before that. He has deep expertise in microprocessors, digital photography, computer hardware and software, internet standards, web technology, and more.
Newcomers to the digital SLR camera realm have no shortage of opportunities for sticker shock. Take, for example, Canon's
It costs about $5,500.
That's more than five times what I got when I sold my not-too-shabby car a while back.
But there's a reason that sticker is so high besides Canon's desire to transfer my salary to its coffers. Those suckers are expensive to make. Or at least that's the impression I got from watching an artful online propaganda video from Canon: the Virtual Lens Plant tour.
The lens consists of 17 optical elements, two of them ultra-low-dispersion glass and one of them a fluorite crystal to reduce chromatic aberrations. On the video, you can watch a pile go through any number of stamping, grinding, polishing, testing and hand-assembly steps to become the lens.
When I saw the technology that goes into the lens and its construction--and inferred some of the research money already spent--it did make the price seem not quite so astronomical. Of course, I'm not going to stop wishing I could get one for one-tenth the price.