Camera prices are rising, and the industry's own cost structure — not manufacturer greed — explains most of the jump. That is the argument Richard Butler advances in the first of a two-part series at DPReview examining why review verdicts on camera pricing so often clash with readers' gut reactions on launch day.

The core context: manufacturers have spent recent years concentrating on high-end users because those customers buy higher-margin products. Even so, cameras aimed at more accessible market segments can look wildly expensive against the prices working photographers remember paying five or ten years ago.

Butler frames that gap as a macroeconomic artifact rather than a pricing strategy failure. For more than two decades, most prices rose around 2% per year, electronics costs fell thanks to outsourcing and economies of scale, and wages generally kept pace with inflation. Large-sensor digital cameras got cheaper at first, then settled into a pattern of improving while holding their price points steady. In that environment, a mental price benchmark set in 2015 or 2018 stayed roughly valid.

That world is gone. Butler points to a stack of inflationary pressures: supply-chain shocks, tariffs, wars pushing up oil and gas prices, and runaway demand for processors and RAM — the last driven substantially by AI, which bids for key components before consumer products can get anywhere near them. Manufacturers' materials, energy, component, wage and logistics costs have all climbed, and component prices have become erratic. The result, per Butler: "They cannot make cameras for the prices we used to pay."

The other half of the equation hits the buyer's side of the ledger. Inflation means the $1,000 a photographer budgeted for a body five or six years ago simply does not represent the same purchasing power today. And because camera replacement cycles for many working shooters have lengthened, the precisely remembered reference point — what you paid for your last body, pre-pandemic — is no longer a realistic baseline.

Butler illustrates the repositioning dynamic with the OM System PEN, which sells for less in nominal terms than the PEN F did a decade ago, and less again in inflation-adjusted "real" terms — making it easier to recognize that the line has been deliberately repositioned to a more affordable slot in the market.

He is candid that none of this amounts to a defense of rising prices. "I'm not trying to defend inflation, or suggesting you should (or even can) just decide it doesn't matter," he writes. His point is narrower: getting frustrated, or insisting the latest camera should cost what your last one did pre-pandemic, changes nothing. Pretending inflation doesn't exist, or attributing rising prices entirely to manufacturer misjudgment or greed, doesn't get anyone anywhere useful.

He anchors the argument in personal experience: a pint at his college pub cost £1.36; visiting the same pub this summer, it cost £5.30. Small annual increments have compounded into a big jump in the past few years, and the same compounding now runs through just about every manufactured product, cameras included.

For photo businesses, the practical takeaway is to price expectations against current component and currency realities rather than remembered launch prices, and to read manufacturers' repositioning moves — like the PEN's shift downmarket — as real data rather than nostalgia violations. Butler promises a second part to the series, which should extend the analysis into how DPReview's own price assessments account for these shifts.