The most money is usually to be made at the sweet spot where you get big enough economies of scale to make money but can still charge a premium.

Oddly enough, cheap lenses tend to have far fewer manufacturing defects than small volume, hand built lenses. There will always be someone looking at the 18-200 and working out if they can tweak it a little by applying the latest manufacturing technique.

Nikon has sold about 4000 DC lenses since 2006. That is $5 million retail, If we assume that the raw materials and manufacturing costs $200 per lens and that the factory gate price is half that of the retail, that leaves $400 per lens to recoup the design costs, $1.6 million total.

I very much doubt that there is any profit after the design costs are sunk. But it might well be worth someone’s while to take the AF design and work out how to fit an AFS motor.

All the articles I have read on the use of the lens tell me that it IS about the bokeh. Bokeh is the look of out of focus areas, that is what defocus control is about.

You control the size of the circles of confusion with the aperture, just as you do on every other lens. The difference is that you can choose whether you have the poor bokeh in front and the good behind or vice versa.

Most lenses have bad or poor bokeh throughout. Some have neutral. A tiny number have great bokeh, almost always behind the focal point.

The party trick with this lens is that you can have great bokeh in front of and behind the focal point by setting the good bokeh to the foreground and shooting against an already diffuse backdrop.

There is however one other way that you can do the same thing without an expensive lens at all. But it requires a lot of custom software. You take two sets of shots. The first is a shot of your subject in focus with a wide aperture as per normal. Then you capture the entire scene with a narrow aperture (multiple shots if necessary). This is the reference frame.

Then in software you take the shots and use the reference frame to isolate the in-focus portions of the shot and subtract them out onto another layer. Finally you fuzz up the reference frame using filter with perfect bokeh and add it to the picture under the focus layer.

24/1.4
35/1.4
85/1.4 update
DC update
80-400 replacement

walkaround : implying casual photography mixed up with other leisure activity, that carrying 2kg of camera might make less enjoyable…

In 1936 Zeiss engineers created a landmark in lens design – the “Olympic” Sonnar. By choosing carefully spherical abberation compensation in such a way the lens had constant image quality at f/2.8 down to f/8, f/11. What is special for this design is Zeiss engineers had chosen to optimise the wide open performance of this lens, thus creating as a side effect the gorgeous bokeh the Sonnar gives.

DC Nikkors are about spherical abberation control giving additional creativity these lenses are used for (e.g. portraiture), one side effect of which is the bokeh.

But I still don’t see what is so wrong with having a design that gives good bokeh behind the focal point and use the aperture setting to decide how much depth of field you want.

If DC is so great, then why aren’t sales stronger? I am pretty sure that an f/1.4 prime would sell rather more than a DC replacement at f/2.

Do you imagine that there’s an all-purpose “great” setting on the lens for all circumstances? You seem much smarter than Nikon’s engineers.

Also, why does my camera have P/S/A/M modes? They should just have P for ‘Professional’.

using old version of it as travel lens but its jsut not performing well enf to be all around lens