pricing - Does it make sense to put an expensive lens on a cheap camera?

I've spent a while looking at lenses and their prices, and now I'm wondering... Does it make sense to bolt a really expensive lens onto a cheap camera? Or is the extra performance only worth it if you have a similarly expensive camera to start with?

Is it "sensible" to buy a lens that costs 10x or 15x the price of the actual camera?

Or, on the contrary, is it "expected" that the lens is the expensive part?

(If I'm looking at the price list correctly, the £400 "kit" I bought consists of a £150 camera with a £250 lens. So already the lens is more expensive than the camera.)

Or is it that the price of the lens and the price of the camera are completely unrelated numbers, and you're paying for different attributes on each part?

Answer

This is mostly an anecdote but here you go. At one point I was shooting on a Canon Rebel XT. New I believe I paid in the range of $500 for the camera. By the end of what I found to be the useful range of the body, I had used a $2,200 70-200mm lens, a $1,500 85mm lens, and a $1,200 50mm lens on multiple occasions.

The lenses all performed wonderfully, and if anything just exposed the limitations of the body I was using. I found that pairing great glass with a not so great body is well worth the exercise for two reasons:

1. To capture great images


2. To understand where my camera body is holding me back

The lenses I give as my own personal examples only have a price difference of 2-4x. A price difference of 10-15x is in a completely different realm. The body itself may not be quite up to the task and may immediately be exposed for its weaknesses. It is possible that it fits your skill set and vision just fine, but only you would know.

Further, if you really can afford a $2,500 lens, why buy a $250 camera? I'm surprised that such a camera will actually fulfill the requirements that a user of such a lens has. In other words, would someone that has a discerning enough eye that needs a $2,500 lens to get the quality that they need actually be happy with a very inexpensive $250 camera? That would be far from typical.

My recommendation would be to bring the price multiplication factor a bit closer to the 2-3x range; I.e. If a $250 body suits your needs, check out $500-$750 lenses as a rough starting point. It is a good idea to spend a great percentage of your investment on lenses, but I think that 1 to 15 is far too great of a gap in all but the most extreme cases.