Your hypothesis unfortunately fails your own test, since Nikon, Canon, etc are still in there.

Furthermore, like I said I believe it is more likely that vendor financing in the camera business takes the form of stocks held on a sale or return basis (float financing via timing differences in creditor/debtor days is much more prevalent in higher stock turnover businesses like grocery or say pubs). If that is so there is no financial risk whatsoever since title is retained by the supplier, except for minor red tape inconvenience in the event of an insolvency.

Separately it is in the nature of retail market power that dominant players are largely able to set their own terms. You have likely heard different stories from many different industries of suppliers moaning about the unfair terms imposed on them by Tescos. And rightly so because they get screwed silly. But at the end of the day they grin and bear it because Tescos is by far the biggest outlet for their products; it is business madness to walk away from that kind of distribution power if you’re aiming for volume. Geddit?

Rather than get into the technicalities of typically structurally negative working capital in most retail businesses, usually provided either by 30/60 days credit from suppliers versus cash receipts from customers, or as I suspect is the case with slr kit at Jessops goods supplied on a sale or return basis, I’ll confine myself to the answer to your question:

Those suppliers that wish to do business with the UK’s dominant retail/distribution outlet and have a presence at the nation’s favourite try-before-you-internet-buy location.

Why don't you consider using Truecrypt.

This is encryption software - always a sensible precaution I feel - that has little impact on read/write speeds.

If you select the option to encrypt the entire drive you can subsequently select the driver letter to 'mount' the decrypted volume to.

Works well for me.

FWIW re Ivy Bridge:

Source: Tech Report

With respect to graphics cards, it is worth remembering that they have significant computing power in their own right.

While AMD’s ATI subsidiary leads the market in price performance for traditional graphics/gaming, Nvidia have done a lot of work establishing standards around their CUDA parallel processing architecture.

You can access this computing power in various ways using bespoke programming, but commercial software is increasingly able to take advantage of CUDA capabilities in everything from VST virtual instruments and effects to video editing, and there is no reason why Photoshop shouldn’t use it selectively in future.

If you’re not a gamer but are looking for a graphics card I would certainly be buying one of the entry level CUDA enabled Nvidia cards, even something with just 16 or 32 cores to have your hat in the ring.

I measured it with one of those power meters bought off Amazon for around £20; cheap and cheerful but does the job and is really quite useful.

Actually the 300W consumption is something of an average. When I got the meter I was shocked to find that my box was drawing around 320W, so I replaced my aging Nvidia Quadro graphics card with a newer model and cut my consumption by just under 50W net.

My CPU is an old but fairly high-end Xenon that was - and in fact still is - quite energy efficient with a TDW of 80W. Unfortunately it is equipped with 16Gb of fully buffered server ram, which produces negligible memory faults but is a real energy hog and just kills overall energy efficiency.

I have a few bits and pieces lying around including pair of Samsung 1.5tb disks, nice case, etc, and if my back of the envelope calculations are correct a new quad core Ivy Bridge with HT, motherboard, 16gb of DDR3 ram, and a couple of hard disks should pay for themselves in around 2 years at current electricity prices. It just shows how insanely high they have gone.

My 2p:

a) It is true that computer technology from 3/4 years ago is fine for Photoshop, but the price difference between that and modern technology is relatively minor, so why go out of your way to buy something outdated - it makes no sense.

b) Buy a computer with 2 equal sized hard disks in a so called Raid 1 configuration where the pair mirror each other creating a realtime backup. Get something no smaller than 1.5tb in which case the extra disk will add maybe just over £100 to the price, but will be money well spent in covering typical non-catastrophic risks to your computer. However, it is always a good idea to have a second backup located with friends or family.

c) Intel are bringing out their next generation of microprocessors codenamed Ivy Bridge at the start of April. This allegedly features much better on-board graphics performance, but more importantly has significantly improved power consumption, apparently at least a third better than the current generation. If your computer tends to be switched on all the time I would wait for that, otherwise I would still wait and look for discounting of existing models closer to launch.

FWIW, I expect to replace my now +4 year old desktop with a new Ivy Bridge based model as soon as possible. My current machine has more than sufficient resources to run a heavy load, but consumes around 300W just in the box itself (no screens, speakers, etc). By moving to Ivy Bridge I expect to cut that to around 125W resulting in considerable savings on my electricity bill.

No need for the red face Pentaxophile; man is not infallible, even though our message board personas are sometimes tempted to give that impression.

Good job too, otherwise life would be incredibly dull.

John, I’m hoping you let my original remarks stand because you rightly recognised that it was in no way a personal attack.

I have worked in the City for many years, which by a wide stretch employs the highest per capita incidence of top class bullshit merchants in any profession, and as a consequence have developed a deep antipathy towards this over the years.

It is not the first time my BS detectors have recently alerted me to a line Pentaxophile was spinning, hence my gentle word of advice meant earnestly without malice no matter how he took it; I think he is much better than that.

As such I stand fully by my remarks, but in light of jaspers’ post I think I should be given the chance to set the record straight and ask why he edited my original post so as to change the meaning?

That’s a bit naughty, even if it was an innocent mistake.

How do you define success? Remember I’m not talking about IQ or handling here, merely business success defined as sustainable profitability.

Now I know next to nothing about the MF market and bet the same holds true for you also, but it is clear that the extent to which the 645D is a niche product it is that of a cut price model in a market of high priced alternatives. In terms of competitive strategy this gets an F, unless volumes are spectacularly high.

As for the Q, that was more of an authentic niche product initially, in that it was afforded premium pricing. However, that has now been reversed with heavy discounting, and if anything proves my point.

Exactly how has the Q technology fed back into dslrs?

A friendly word of advice to you, Pentaxofile: careful with the BS, it has a habit of becoming a way of life.