[Katsunami]

LOL. At one of the photography exhibitions I attended in the past, I asked one of the Zeiss people outright:

"Why are your lenses so much less expensive than Leica's? Their lenses are often 4x the price of yours."

The answer was surprising:

- "Because Leica's lenses are better than ours."

*** JAW DROP ***

But then he said:

- "However, you must take the following into account. If you take a 100% lens to be perfect, our lenses score 98%. Leica's lenses score 99%, but are 4x more expensive. A 100% lens would have an almost infinite price. We can and do create lenses approaching 100% perfection*, but not for the consumer market. In our opinion, the price/performance ratio would not not be right."

There you have it, and it's fully understandable.

(* Zeiss creates lenses for use in NASA deep space exploration telescopes, and for use in ASML's lithography machines, for example.)