I guess the main answer is simple: such a manufacturer would have to compete with the millions of old cameras that people still have. It is difficult to compete with something, what already exists, and at the same time has almost zero cost. Yes, zero cost. It has already been purchased from the manufacturer. They were made, sold, and the money changed hands.

Today you can compete only with the cost of high-quality repairs of old equipment. In other words: there are good old Leica and Contax cameras. They are 70-90 years old. Some of them have collectible value, and some of them don’t. But to use them for practical shooting, these cameras need to be repaired. The price of such work is several hundred dollars. So it turns out that the production of a new camera should be such that the selling price is comparable to the service price of a good old camera.

And this is, currently, not really possible. Cameras have always been very complicated equipment and, above all, technologically complex. The titanium blades of the focal shutter are really high-tech. And also very expensive. The normal price of a mechanical shutter was possible only with millions copies of cameras. With a print run of ten thousand copies, the price of a high-quality focal plane shutter today will be at least 1.5k USD. A ready-made camera costs 2-3K USD is waiting for an extremely limited implementation on the market.

Do we remember that film photography is now just an art form? Art tools are expensive. And it is expensive because art cannot be very mass. It’s the vicious circle! In the past, photography had utilitarian function and hundreds of millions of consumers. And now the situation is different. Not hundreds of millions of potential buyers of new cameras, but maybe 10,000. Or 100,000. Or maybe a million?

This will greatly depend on the price of the new camera. The difference between 200 USD and 1600 USD is not just eight times. This difference means that a photography student can afford a 200 USD camera. The student will not buy a camera for 1600. He will find something in the secondhand market. And the secondhand market is huge. It has been created by hundreds of different manufacturers for a hundred years