21 "Update" Price
I beta tested version 21 and very quickly decided that it was not worth the price to me even at half price. I love how the "update" shows up with a massive price tag. I suppose my gripe is minor and that this should be worked as an upgrade. Not an update. It feels a lot like an update to me but for some it seems to be worth the insane price tag.
What I want to know how a previous licence of C1 is only worth $100 bucks towards the upgrade in the eyes of Phase One. If someone buys the program outright for $400 they get the entire program. For someone who is already a loyal user they get a few new features for $300. This is obviously going to cause a poor response from the user base.
I know people will argue that it is comparable to the subscription price model. But what I urge those people to ruminate on is that the price to feature cost ratio between a new licence and an upgrade licence is grossly disparaging. The upgrade path is very unattractive at a 25% discount on the cost of the full product.
Put it this way if the upgrade was $100 I am guessing 4 times as many people would upgrade. And perhaps some would stop steeling it in the long run. Word would spread that Capture One has a great upgrade policy and the user base would increase over time. As it stands at every upgrade there are a lot of very unhappy customers running old versions complaining about the price structure and that is very bad advertising.
Just my 2 cents
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You're not alone here.
I ran a poll on a local Facebook photographers group. Out of all that responded, the overall majority are not upgrading. The next significant group either never heard of or used C1. Only one person said they were going to upgrade as they already were a 'subscriber'.
I tried bringing this up to Phase1 and was hoping to get an email back asking for some more detail. Alas, there was zero interest in the information I had gathered.
The last time I upgraded to v20 it cost me $99 and for me, that was a no-brainer. This time around it's more like $300 to upgrade. Not only did it give me a pause, I decided to skip it altogether.
A couple of things for Phase1 execs to note. Gmail became the most popular email client on the planet because it was free. Davinci Resolve is rocketing to the top of video editors and it's free. Affinity Photo is stealing users away from Photoshop and it started free and still it's a far cry from $400 to buy outright.
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Ditto. Phase One has "mooned" their existing customers, who generally are tremendously enthusiastic and loyal about the product --and great promoters! Without them, Capture One will never succeed in weaning more photographers from the 'Other', which clearly enjoys a much, much larger piece of the market. I bit the C21 carrot they dangled --a few new tantalizing features (which later turned out to be all of them)-- and afterwards the bullet, since the price was higher than before and no discount was offered to existing license holders. Bad on you, Phase One, for although I will doubtless continue to use the product, my enthusiasm has waned considerably. The new features are trivial and, frankly, the new version is buggy overall. Nor do I detect the inclusion of some of the most frequent and simplest to implement features requested by users. I wish that I too had resisted upgrading to C21 and, despite the financial loss, am considering rolling back to C20, just for performance. Funny how an "upgrade" has actually managed to degrade an otherwise superb product. For those of you who resisted and might be rethinking it, for godsake wait until the first major revision appears (14.X)!
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I agree with Randall that the first version (as most of the time, for pretty much every software product i ever used) of v21 is buggy. So if you don't need to upgrade now (and why would you), wait for the next patch, or the one after.
In terms of pricing and not upgrading. To each his own. I disagree with the sentiment, and especially with the comparison to ad-ware products like Gmail (beside gmail did not become the biggest because it's free, it became the biggest because it was the best of the free - big difference. Not like gmail was the only free mail client at the time, but it was the first free good browser based client).
If you are a hobbiest, than 300$ (is this australian? canadian? i get the full version for 300 CHF in switzerland) is a significant chunk of cash, i get that. If you are a semi pro, if you are one of those hobbiests that just payed 5K for a Canon R5 or 4K for a Nikon Z7 II, and you are complaining about this price for software, sorry, i have no sympathy for you.
Good software needs to have it's price, and small companies need to have a buisiness model. They can also freely choose to not fight for marketshare (which i hope they don't, they can't win this), but for quality.
Building software is expensive. Accept that. Only shit is free, or you sell your soul when you use the product. Then you end up with photosoftware from the likes of Zuckerberg. And I rather support PhaseOne with their product to end up just having the garbage heap of free software available to me.
Frank
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@Frank: it's not that it's expensive, it's that it's irrationally expensive and makes NO SENSE.
In 2019 I bought Capture One Pro v12 for Fujifilm for 250€. Now the current Capture One Pro 21 for Fujifilm costs 150€ - that's 100€ less!!!!
In 2020 I upgraded to Capture One Pro 20 (full version) for 170€. Now the upgrade price from one full version to the next would be 170€ - from what I've head it was 69€ last year.
=> That makes no sense at all.
I've upgraded to the full version thinking it will be cheaper in the following years but obviously I didn't account for Phase One management getting greedy. I don't know how expensive it is to upgrade from the branded version to the full version at the moment but following their pricing scheme it should be around 220€-270€. That's absurd.
The full version is 350€ - so basically now the upgrade price from the previous version is at least 50% of the full price of a new version.
I'm guessing they don't want people to upgrade at all, but to switch to a subscription and I don't want to do that. It's bad enough Adobe went that way with Photoshop but at least Photoshop really is expensive enough to justify the annual fee (which is actually CHEAPER THAN A CAPTURE ONE UPGRADE!!! and contains Lightroom too).
I really doubt this will work out for Capture One in the long run, they're driving away customers with their prices, lack of features and the way they 'downgraded' the whole support system.3 -
I hope they reconsider their horrible marketing strategy, there are many other SW out there, LR+PS are not expensive...so, they did the right thing with the release 20, the increase the customers, now the genius of Marketing is going to loos many of the new customers.
They don't listen to the customers, at least they don't listen to amateurs photographers but only to fashion pro...
P1 be careful, customers are hard to get bu easy to loose...
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It's funny, many moved away from Adobe because of their subscription model.
But now the PS/LR deal at $9,99/m seems pretty attractive, C1 subscription is 240% more expensive.And the way the 20 to 21 upgrade was presented was in almost a scam.
"Upgrade to 21 to a "reduced" price before it's to late" even though nothing about the upgrade was presented.
I think many of us thought that the upgrade would be substantial but wasn't really that impressive, at least not for what we paid.Also... while it's nice to see live sessions and YouTube videos they now days mostly are about selling preset packages instead of showing how we can use C1 to get those results and other advanced techniques.
I will never upgrade C1 again before i know what the upgrade is, and that the price is more affordable.
Upgrading should be much cheaper, that's how you keep old loyal customers.Not all of us use C1 professional.
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The software "Capture One" is no longer developed and sold by Phase One.
There is now an independent company called "Capture One".
FWIW, I don't mind paying a premium price for a premium product but C1 is just way too buggy to command the prices they started asking for it.
V21 has issues with undo, exporting (images with heal layers), the keystone tool is still broken, etc. The complete list of issues remaining with the software is embarrassingly long.
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I am completely with TO
What I also find completely incomprehensible are the price differences between the camera manufacturers. As a Canon user you pay € 300,- for the update, last year it was just over € 100,-.
I will certainly not pay € 300,- for the update.1 -
I've decided to leave Capture One for this reason. I upgraded from 12 Pro (€125) Fujifilm to 20 for €65. After seeing the price for the upgrade to 21/22, which is €170, I've decided it's not worth it at all. This is purely a money grab and the Adobe CC Photography plan looks like the deal of the decade comparatively. It's nearly 50% cheaper AND you get Photoshop included.
Now that ACR deals with Fuji X-Trans files much better than before, I've decided to go back to Lightroom+Photoshop. Adding the availability of mobile/tablet support to the equation just makes the deal look even better.
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I'm considering abandoning C1 also. The costs to upgrade are ridiculously high. I still have to subscribe to Photoshop as C1 is lacking in features so I effectively get Lightroom thrown in...maybe it's time to forget about C1 altogether.
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I have also cancelled my subscription because of it's pricing and going back to Lightroom. I'm only a hobbyist and can't afford those ever increasing prices. I have been with Lightroom before and found it very user friendly. The reason I moved to C1 was it's better conversion of Fuji RAW files. But never mind, something has to give. Bye C1.
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Capture One Pro 9 is available for $269 through the Phase One website. If you already have version 7 or 8 of the software, you can upgrade for $99. There’s also a subscription plan that gives you access to the program for $15 per month
[https://www.slrlounge.com/time-switch-lightroom-capture-one-pro-heres-might/ ]
Good old days.
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I started to use Capture One Express Fuji when getting my X100V.
As I wanted the layers, I switched soon after to C1 21 Pro trial version. And I must say I was impressed. I really liked the speed, the interface and the results.
I did also try LR (very slow despite my i7U 16GB RAM SSD laptop), Exposure X7 (terribly slow and terrible performance with recovering details in highlights like first sun rays of the day), Luminar (processing would take up all my CPU and RAM resources!), On1, ACDSee (bad at recovering details in highlights as well) and DxO PL5 (the latter was slower as well, but still bearable, and the Raw converter did the second best job after C1).
I still wanted to go with C1 perpetual licence, but last Monday’s "mega BF offer" concerned subscription only (20% off). Once my disappointment gone, I went for DxO products, offered at minus 50%.
Today I got a mail stating that C1 perpetual licence was also at 50% for a few days. (why not on Monday, guys???)
Would I have purchased DxO PL5 knowing this? Not sure.
Do I regret having bought PL5: No. Deep Prime is awesome. And it does a great job.
Would I still like to work with C1 Pro? Yes, definitely. I loved the layers/masking and the magic brush.
Do I consider buying C1 Pro 21 at CHF 155 instead of CHF 310? TbH, I’d bite the bullet if the upgrade to C1 22 was included. But it’s not. And that’s a bad joke!!!
DxO released its latest version of the software with the major improvement consisting of X-Trans sensor support before Black Friday and offers it at generous 50% discount.
Whereas C1 will bring out v22 in a few weeks and expects to milk again customers who just bought the software.
These are two different business approaches (or mentalities). And TBH, I have the impression that for once, ethics are on the French side!0 -
My current issue is they don’t have an exit strategy. If you stop paying for C1 you lose access to your images. With adobe you can use Lightroom for free, just not the develop module. But can still see them and print them. So i am thinking of buying a perpetual license to keep access to the last 4 years of images and then switching back to Lightroom. I am just not comfortable with losing access to all my images if I can’t pay.
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I don't understand this panic, nobody is forced to have pictures exclusively in a cloud. And if any requirements make it necessary, I always get the images back to my local computer immediately.
So why should you lose access to your own images ?
The RAW's and the developed jpg's, tif's etc. remain with me locally and there nobody can and will deny me the access.0 -
> Anton Timelthaler: ...nobody is forced to have pictures exclusively in a cloud
I did not see Ryan T use the word "cloud".
If I understand his worries, the image files are on disk, but he fears C1 one day calls home, finds his subscription license expired and then refuses to start. I do not know if C1 refuses to start (in contrast to LR), but if so he may loose metadata and edits for images not yet exported. Image files should still be available for use with alternative software, regardless of cloud or not.
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Even with the perpetual license, I think after 6 weeks or so C1 will refuse to start if the activation server of C1 is offline, think about they going bankrupt or they being attacked (last year's log4j attack resulted in some business services (not C1) down for months!).
You will have access to the raw files but not to the edits (useless without C1 though) but also not to your added metadata, if your are using a catalog and haven't already saved them in xmp files.
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Oh my goodness, you discuss the apocalypse.
The super disaster of insolvency hits you with every manufacturer.
But there is also a solution for this case, so what the heck?-1 -
See, I have a perpetual license which allows me to use, even install on new machines, C1 for the rest of my life, if I am not mistaken, and I want to be able to actually do so.
Closing down a business, insolvency and hacker attacks are more common as you think.
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Capture One had a generous sale recently and I went for it. They were quick to reply to a question about registration I had; the turnaround was less than 12 hours.
Expensive program but the customer service experience I had was great. The upgrade is rather pricey but I think I would commit to upgrading every two versions for that price. The program, for me, is far more stable than LR and the other competition.
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