I <3 Robots

I can't reach the thumb levers in the drops either and I can't shift Shimano levers without sometimes grabbing brake too. I use SRAM...their levers let me shift in the hoods and drops.

Campag wanted a single function for each lever (from what I've read). I do like the brake caliper release on the lever body.

Friend is running Super Record on his bike...it does look the class.

Alias530

As stupid a comparison as that is, I think it's worth noting how heavy Shimano is. I have no idea what a Super Record group weighs but if Campy's mid level group weighs 1/3 a pound less than Shimano's top of the line... coming from a Dura Ace 9000 owner

79pmooney

I'm not a gruppo guy. In fact, I don't often buy parts new. Have zero issues with mix and match. My good bike has a Dura Ace front and Campy Mirage rear. Both do their jobs VERY well and are a joy. But wheels? When I went to 9 speed, I decided to go Campy. Why? Main reason was that if I ever went to brifters, I had no interest in the Shimanos. For a start (at that time) Shimano had those goofy cables hanging out in space. But far bigger, I consider brake levers sacrosanct. They are the part that might save my life someday. I have been using levers that have not changed in function for most of 50 years. I am WAY, WAY past relearning how to operate them. Shimano choose to cause one of my routine riding practices to shift gears! I regularly place a finger firmly on the outside of the lever to steady the HBs when I reach down for a WB or remove the other hand for any reason. Separating brake levers and shift levers is, for me, the way things should work.

Now, after riding those Campy 9 speed cassettes for 7 years, I love the collection of cogs I have. All the cogs I could want to make a super cassette are available. All the cogs from 12 - 19, 21, 23, 25, and 28. And I can go 12, 13 or 14 as a high gear. I regularly go 12, 14, etc. skipping the 13. Maybe this can be done with Shimano. At this point, it doesn't matter.

I have often felt Campy was designed and made by folks passionate about riding. Shimano had better engineers, factory, and marketing but riding and maintaining bikes as I do is what they don't do. (My real love is SunTour, but sadly, those days have passed. Still enjoy riding the SunTour gear I do have.)

Ben

kbarch

Why do people get so worked up about this? Component systems are not commodities. There's no good reason for them to cost the same: different parts, occasionally different materials, and substantially different arrangements. Taking the "top of the line" from two different makers doesn't imply an 'apples to apples' comparison. The top of the line Benz is more expensive than the top of the line Toyota, and it's not just because Benz is a 'prestige,' historic European brand. Sure, Lexus is a fine car, but it's no S65, and it certainly never was a Maybach.

lsberrios1 

You are comparing hot dogs to salami. Lexus ls4** to s550. They are very close, and lexus lfa to ferrari 458? Give me the lexus all day long but yet again this is reversing the roles since the lexus cost 1.5 as much as thr 458 and it isnt as fast yet the finish quality of the lexus is better.

sced

The ergonomics can be controlled by choice of right bar design and bar and brifter installation. I ride SRAM, Shimano, and Campy and they all work equally well for me, though there are differences in how they feel.

Super Record is just a bling thing, like a Rolex. It is pointless to compare it to DA or Red. The more interesting comparisons are between the low/mid and high end groups. The cost-benefits of the more expensive groups are very questionable.

kansukee

5k? Someone is trying to **** you. I got my Record EPS group for 2,300.

BillyD

Why do you hate the 41?

K.Katso

Yeah, that is high. It averages about 3000€ for the complete groupset here locally. I'd say that's still fairly competitive with Dura Ace Di2, which tends to be around 2400€. I actually would have bought Super Record EPS for my latest build if I didn't already have such a significant investment in Shimano-compatible wheels. That's important because I can swap them between bikes, and my other main bike has SRAM Red on it.

rpenmanparker 

Just IMO but I feel the intent of the manufacturers is for Red/DA/Record and SR to compete with each other, Force/Ultegra/Chorus to compete and Rival/105/Athena to compete with regard to performance. My understanding is that SR is not really intended to function differently than Record, but only to be a little lighter and a whole lot prettier. Anyway I think the sensible discussion is whether those performance targets are met by the various manufacturers and do their products acquit themselves well against their NOMINAL performance competition.

Alias530

Dura Ace is double the cost of Ultegra (approximately, depends where you look), so I wouldn't be surprised if Super Record EPS is double the cost of Record EPS. I just went to the first website I could find that sold it. Dura Ace 9000 at this website was $1,050 which is the lowest I've seen it online so I figured it was reasonable to think SR EPS was priced normally there.

Alias530

Because it's a very specific functioning item. It's like a mechanical pencil or headlights on your car. Obviously there is extensive use of carbon in the upper Campy groups, but carbon crank arms is the only substantial place over Dura Ace. It has it on the front derailleur and body of the rear derailleur instead of just the cage but that's not that much.

Bob Ross

Just for the record (no pun intended), ^^^this is quite honestly precisely why my next bike will have Campy Super Record on it. It's won't be my first bike (or second, or third), not my first rodeo, and so the whole concept of Cost/Benefit just isn't of any interest to me when I spec the parts. I've patiently saved my hard-earned money, I'm not shirking some other important responsibilities by dropping major coin on a swanky groupset, and so not only is there no need for me to be frugal when designing my dream bike, there's also no point; it's supposed to be a dream bike!

And so when I roll my middle-aged ass up to the coffee shop on my SR-equipped halo bike and folks start snickering about how I could have gotten 99.9% of the performance at 50% of the price if I'd only bought Chorus, I will happily ooze so much IDon'tGiveA****** that it will get all over those kids' pink Rapha shoe covers.

Cliff Notes: Yes, bikes are fetishes. Why would you want a less-than-phenomenal fetish?

coasting 

you campy fanboys talk as much nonsense as someone i met recently. see if this sounds ridiculous:

i asked a businessman who his competitors were. he said he has no competitors. but his industry is really competitive, yet he refused to name a single competitor. he explained that his product was so much better than the other companies chasing the same customers that he did not consider them to be direct competitors.

how idiotic.

himespau 

Well, I would because I prefer the aluminum looks of Athena (though the Super Record cranks aren't as bad as they were a few years back). Now, if I could magically get a brand new record triple from say 2003 or so, that'd be the bee's knees and the sort of thing I'd pay extra for.

coasting 

comparing top of the line mercedez to a top of the line toyota is a valid comparison. the differences between the cars justifies the difference in price. it is idiotic to say they are not apples with apples. it is precisely the difference between apples and oranges that is worth evaluating.

bt

So from the answers in this thread, it's more expensive because the makers haven't figured out the intricacies of mass production ?

And since they haven't figured it out, people perceive it to be betterer?

rpenmanparker 

Not exactly. I'm sure they understand mass production. What they most likely haven't adopted is automation. They spend more to make the parts knowing they can recover the difference due to the Eye-talian mystique. Incremental manual labor can be an incremental cost, but that isn't true of a capital investment. If they don't want their money tied up in equipment, they can just hire more of those expert Eye-talian (and Romanian) craftsmen. Then if they ever need to cut back, it is just the labor force that has to be jettisoned, not capital investment. That keeps debt low. For a smaller volume, boutique operation it makes a lot of sense. Remember the trick to making money is not being largest, it is being best at operating the business. McDonalds is the biggest, but not likely the most profitable. I would guess that In-n-Out makes a lot more ROCI (return on capital investment) than McDonalds does. For a family business, Campy may be doing just fine, thank you very much. They don't have any need to make a bunch of unrelated shareholders rich, just each other.

Leinster

I don't get the impression that Campy are afraid of automation, as much as decreasing quality control as volume increases. They don't come across to me as the sort of company to jettison labour as soon as sales/orders go down. Those Romanian artisans aren't chiseling out Veloce cranks by hand from an aluminium ingot, they're operating the big machines that churn cranks and caliper arms and derailleur plates all day every day.

I think their position is that they're happy with their market share, and don't see any drastic need to kill every other competitor in the marketplace. Milan-San Remo is winner-take-all. Providing the groupset to the winner of MSR is not. If Shimano wants to take the McDonalds route, and make sure everybody in the world is no more than half an hour away from a Big Mac, and can get there on a bike with a Tiagra derailleur, that's fine for Shimano. But I think if Shimano didn't exist, Campy would still be making and selling exactly as many groupsets as they do now, and leaving it to somebody else (Suntour, Sachs, Modolo, Simplex, or any number of other manufacturers who have been pushed out of the groupset business) to take up the slack.

himespau 

I wonder when they made that decision. Didn't they used to be bigger players? Not that it's wrong, it's just not the decision most companies seem to make.

indyfabz

I'm having a custom frame built. Was going to go with DA 11 but I am now thinking about getting Campy SR 11. Which should I get?

rideBjj

FWIW, I started riding with shimano STI in 1992. It was dura-ace.

Every bike I have had in the ensuing 23 years has been shimano. I'd never even ridden a bike with Campy on it.

Until, I bought a bike earlier this year with 2010 Centaur, which has the ultrashift (or whatever it is specifically called where you can upshift 5 cogs with one press on the thumb lever).

That is absolutely awesome. Between that and the fact that it uses a thumb lever and the brake lever is used only for braking, I feel this makes Campy FAR superior to shimano in terms of ergonomics and function (quality and durability being completely separate matters). To hell with pushing a lever back and forth once for each cog you want to jump. In comparison, that concept seems idiotic.

If it is at all possible, I will only use Campy ultrashift on bikes from here on out. It is a bit of a drag that you have to pony up for Chorus+ to get it these days (right?).

indyfabz

I remember my dad, who was of Italian descent, telling me about how long it took the Italians to make fighters for WII due to the fact that they would do things like painstakingly hand-sew the leather seats. If you ever go to the Smithsonian Air & Space museum look at the Italian fighter on display. The seat is gorgeous.

CenturionIM

Why is Apple product so expensive?

People pay for it.

cellery

The price premium is in order to have the little basil/tomato/mozarella flag "Product of Italy" label on the box. Like the frozen pizza I bought the other day, it had that logo and definitely bumped up the price. I'm hungry.