I haven't seen one of these machines but it looks like knob on left is on/off, knob on right is rotation speed, and it looks like the temperature controller is set with the small buttons on the LED readout. Jobo sources knobs, no one makes an injection molding tool that costs $30,000 to make knobs you can buy for 50 cents a piece. Half the parts in a Ferrari are made by Fiat, that doesn't make it less of a Ferrari, just more reliableOriginally Posted by BetterSense
Peace, Mike
But $1600 ???
I will say this thing only about price, and leave the rest for the forumserts to do the usual rest:
Over the years, there have been MANY who came forward and promised to build a processor that would be cheaper, better, made with easy to find, easy to service off the shelf parts, that will do it all and cost less then a six pack, and will be commercially viable, easy to manufacture and ready in about but no later then 2-3-4 weeks, or 6 months, or 2 years and eventually never. None have yet come up and presented their solution, none have marketed such a thing.
To a large extent, it comes down to the fact the actual cost to make these things is greater then the sum cost of parts. Insurance, liability and responsability for selling electronics, not to mention the ability to back up claims of what it can and cannot do, the time spent on R&D, testing, fabricating, discussions with suppliers is not something you can do in a weekend. Just ask those folks making the travelwide, who are finding it hard to ship out a completed (?) product because of the shipping logistics which are taking weeks and months on end.
Add to that the fact this is not a mass market product despite the fact it requires all the same manufacturing resources and facilities as a mass market product, the cost of doing each little thing must be amortized in the price of the units sold, adding to the overall cost. People need to be paid, and believe me - no one is going to be a millionaire by making this or any other machine, not even close. The folks behind this machine do it to satisfy their passion, and hope to pay the bills. They are in the wrong business if they or anyone else thinks or hopes otherwise.
All this is without counting the decades of manufacturing and production experience these types of project require. They are either paid for as a third party (again, read travelwides very wise recent comments about KS projects), or they come built in with the people running the project.
At the end of the day - i put it to all those who have something to say about the price - i will welcome, promote, buy and support any such endeavor of someone who can "do it better/cheaper/faster/add your own" right away, and without hesitation, as i have done in the past, but alas, i am afraid the chances of that happening are less then slim. Good luck to them all.
As for the price of this and other photographic equipment - this machine will never be obsolete, most defenitly not in 6-12 months as many 5-6K$ digital cameras folks buy like hotcakes without blinking an eye. Cheap stuff costs less, no one is forcing anybody to buy anything. We hear people here complaining about the cost of LF gear. When in history could you ever buy a top of the line lens (or LF anything for that matter) for less then several thousand bucks? Today you can. Take the savings and allocate them where it counts.
If you want I would bet you could get Stark to sell it for $799, If you gave them a bonifide "Take or Pay" contract to buy 35,000 a year for 7 years. Kinda like a Pentagon contractOtherwise building these things one at a time, $1600 seem like a deal to me if it does what is intended to do. You can't amortize hard tooling any longer for products like this. However because you don't have to pay for the tooling, If done right you will end up with a great durable purpose built product.
I'm OUT, PEACE!
Priced entirely over-the-top silly,
Who in the world would make them piecemeal? It makes no sense at all.building these things one at a time, $1600 seem like a deal to me
.
I have been doing my work for so long for so little money that I guess I only see it from my side where I make less and spend less. Keep forgetting that there is another side where people have to make money.
I have forgotten some of my calculus where one uses the derivative to determine optimization of price to sell the maximum number of units. But I think it would be somewhat obvious that the less they charge for it the more units they will sell. It would be interesting to know what the optimized price is for that unit.
That is only obvious if you are selling a mass market product, like say, kaiser rolls at a super market. Because at most, there are not many buyers for this type of thing, no matter what the price, this is not even a consideration in price. 1000 vs 100, does not make it a mass market and will not change the cost of production. Because the market is so very small, it is even harder to bring a product like this to market.
The only thing that factors in is the cost to make it and distribute it, as i noted in detail above.
Even within the "small" market there still is optimization. The market for that unit is people who process their own negatives and prints and do not yet own a satisfactory processor but want one. People may not need one, but they might want one, and would buy one if the price point were correct for them. Even if the company only made a dollar on those marginal units it still would have been beneficial to sell them.
If they only made 1$ on each machine how would that be worth it?
I put it to you then, to design and market a machine which fits your suggested price point. Good luck.
I've worked in the appliance manufacturing business for about 25 years, in Engineering we would fight and scrape to take a dime out of the cost of a $800 refrigerator. 10 cents times 1.5 million units , 150k a year, A guy would be a hero, the saying was VOLUME hides a lot of sins. That is until you start losing 100 bucks on 1.5 million units a year. Then you close dozens of plants, layoff thousands of workers and realize you can't compete with a 100 billion dollar a year Korean Giant. SO you gather 10 or 20 truly talented people and make a specialty product, maybe you only make 2000 a year but YOU pay the salaries and the investors make a profit.
The product I work on now is unique, is for a very small market segment and we (and our company investors) wouldn't be doing it for nothing. And guess what,....We have people standing in line to buy our product.
My take on this Stark machine is it nicely fills a "Niche" that no other product is serving right now, accurate temperature controlled back and forth rotation that will take almost any tank made. Takes 30 seconds to fill and empty the reservoir and will fit almost anywhere. Get it out, fill it with water, use it and put it away.
You don't need a lift, you can make a tempering bath with a bucket and an immersion heater for $50 bucks. I like it just the way it looks. Keep it simple, robust, reliable, easy to use, that's a value proposition.
Again, we are seeing the old Jobos going to the grave, this stuff can't last forever, the ONLY reason that there is a CPP3 is because Jobo saved the thermoforming and injection molding tools from the earlier models THANK GOD. If you want to have this kind of equipment you need to support the manufacturers, their service network, and the retailers.
I said I'M OUT once before, I will try to keep quiet this time
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