OK, the new Zeiss lenses, BFD, I agree with ken Rockwell, they look
like generic off brand lenses, non of the nice finish they had with
Contax and Zeiss before. He also didn't feel they were any better than
the Nikon 50's in fact he felt they had an infereior build. Now to
determine if he actually has one to test.

Tom

In electronics manufacture, on the chip end, you have process cost,
wafer size, and yield that pretty much drive your costs.

On the PC Board assembly side, area is of course important, but so is
the cost of the individual chips, and the more integration you can
sensibly do to pack functionality onto fewer chips, the better off you
are.  

For a more advanced ic fabrication process (i.e. 0.18 micron vs 0.35
micron), there are more costs on one hand because all of the equipment
including reticles, steppers, polishers, and such all cost more, there
may be more process steps, you may need a higher level cleanroom in
the fab, etc.   So, in that respect smaller geometries cost you more
up front.  Every once in a while, wafers gets bigger too which also
increases how many die you can get off a process slot.

Now, where you usually make up for this, however, is that in a smaller
geometry, for a given number of transistors, you can pack a lot more
functionality onto a chip, the chip may get smaller, and your yield
goes up.   Integration of several items onto one chip can reduce costs
too down the line in system assembly because instead of having PC
board room for 3 chips, you just need one, etc.  

So while functionality for a given chip of X transistors gets cheaper
as technology marches on, relatively speaking, a given fixed chip area
actually gets more expensive over time because market pressures are
forcing megapixel wars, and that same fixed area is having to support
higher and higher levels of technology while the area doesn't get any
smaller.  

The rub with full frame sensors is that ... by definition, we're
dealing with a chip of an area of at least 24x36mm.  That has upwards
of 12million pixels on it.  And we don't want to tolerate any of em
being dead.  And that's pretty goddamned big/hard to do in the IC
realm, so yields of these behemoths aren't so great (but are
improving).  APS-C sensors are 22mm x 15mm.  38% of the area.  Much
easier to make, yields are better, less area, double whammy makes
APS-c a lot cheaper.

That is a problem indeed.  Digital mount lenses (EF-S) designed for
the cropped field of view sensors seek to address that on the cheaper
APS-C sensor sizes.

I don't think we'll see $1000 full frame dSLR camera any time soon,
for instance.   I aree with Bob Atkins though, that $2000 might be a
magic number to get more prosumers to get to full frame though:

       http://www.photo.net/oped/bobatkins/full_frame.html

--
Todd H.  
http://www.toddh.net/