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ZEISS DTI thermal imaging cameras. For more discoveries at night, and during the day.

How much is profit, how much is quality (1 Viewer)

Hi
An earlier post talked about the "luxury" brand and the premium price you can attach to it for the wealthy. My sister was looking after a house as rental agent in the south of France and showed me round. There was a brand new Swarovski scope in the living room pointing out to sea. I mentioned that this was some kind of scope to be leaving in an empty house for three quarters of the year - she said the owner bought one for every room so guests could look out at the bay! 6 scopes sitting on tripods doing nothing altogether..
Paul
 
Hi
An earlier post talked about the "luxury" brand and the premium price you can attach to it for the wealthy. My sister was looking after a house as rental agent in the south of France and showed me round. There was a brand new Swarovski scope in the living room pointing out to sea. I mentioned that this was some kind of scope to be leaving in an empty house for three quarters of the year - she said the owner bought one for every room so guests could look out at the bay! 6 scopes sitting on tripods doing nothing altogether..
Paul
:eek!:
 
NG, thanks. But, I'm afraid, now - yes, it's another lightning change, and I have to retract that denial of schizophrenia - I favour the Zeiss 7x42 FL, reverting to my position a year ago (in green on that chart). For dark conditions its better FOV plus brightness are more attractive than the Leica's better edge clarity plus contrast. There's no hurry, so will wait and see if there's a Z. 7x42 HT soon - that'll be even better than the FL if it retains that field. By then there may also be a L. New Trinovid 7x42.

The relevance to the title of this thread? Got the new Kowa 6x30 porro this month and am utterly pleased (with everything except close focus). At US$ 100 it is 470 g, has astonishing optical quality, 8° FOV and waterproofing. K. make a 8x42 roof at $ 210 with the same optical quality (as I gather) but FOV 6.3°. I'd make a vague guess that increasing that to the 8° level of Z. and L. will raise the price to max. double of that, and a 7x will be close. The present Z. and L. 7x42 are resp. 1,900 and 2,000. Superior, yes, but about 4 times the price!

The kowa seems similar to the leupold. Post a full review.

Both the zeiss and leica 7's are nice.
 
NG, for the moment I'm afraid can offer only the foll., already posted a few days ago (in a thread on 6-6.5x bins begun by you). By "astonishing optical quality" above I mean for the price, but even compared with the best I reckon it'll rate at least Very Good, and if not side-by-side with such would be strikingly good to most people (experienced) - to me "astonishing"!
Kowa YF 6x30:

The review by optics4birding matches own my experience except edge sharpness is better than I expected from thier description - that it's "a bit 'mushy'" - may be there's individual variation. (Minor point - the obj. caps on mine are not loose.) Seems to be even better optically than the Leupold Yosemite - going by what I read - I have not looked through the L. Slightly lighter than the L. but nitrogen-filled waterproof unlike it. US$100. Delighted!

[...] Seems this model is generic with the L.Y. and Opticron Savanna 6x30, and possibly the Vortex and the Eagle 6.5x32s. (The O.S. has good close focus, is waterproof, and prob. about US$200.)

Waiting for a chance to see if the combination of larger exit pupil and optical quality make it better (for useful detail) in very dark situations vs the best 8x32s and 10x42s!
 
Hi Newfie,

to give you an idea about the profit margin, I'd like to make a rough guess: For 2000 $/€ binoculars there's a margin of about 25-30%. Of course there is some variation from company to company. BTW, within the optical industry, the Leica Ultravid had for years the reputation as the bins of the highest production costs. Don't know if things have changed since Swarovision.

To put things a bit into perspective: the contribution to overall production costs of optics and mechanics is about 50:50. If a pair of binoculars that cost today 2000,-$/€ would made complete by an optician's hand with a cherry guaranty it would cost more than 8000$/€. There are some single collimation lenses that are made with the tightest tolerances that cost alone ~5000 $.

Steve
 
NG, for the moment I'm afraid can offer only the foll., already posted a few days ago (in a thread on 6-6.5x bins begun by you). By "astonishing optical quality" above I mean for the price, but even compared with the best I reckon it'll rate at least Very Good, and if not side-by-side with such would be strikingly good to most people (experienced) - to me "astonishing"!

Great thanks, I must have missed it before.

Thanks to everyone for your responses. I love glass, but my pocket book doesn't.
 
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Hi Steve

When you say profit margin, which margin are you referring to?

For example in the UK market, Zeiss Wetzlar will make a margin selling to Zeiss UK, who will make a margin selling to the dealer, who makes a margin to Bin Maniacs like Us.

Lee
 
Hi Steve

When you say profit margin, which margin are you referring to?

For example in the UK market, Zeiss Wetzlar will make a margin selling to Zeiss UK, who will make a margin selling to the dealer, who makes a margin to Bin Maniacs like Us.

Lee

Lee,

I referred to the margin of the manufactorer when the piece of optics leaves the factory. Of course, cheap binoculars do have a smaller margin. The profit then should be generated by a higher number of sales.

Steve
 
Steve, as a Leica owner I'm happy and intrigued (and nervous) to learn that. Could you please give some directions for source info?

Lee (and S.), sorry to jump in, but as someone who has already responded to the title of the thread quite a bit already, the underlying assumption in my simple take was, of course, that until this point in the thread "profit" meant the Final Maniac Margin.
 
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When Steiner failed to sell many pairs of their new top quality 8x44 & 10x44 Discovery/XP at the price of £1200 in the UK, they reduced the price of them for a few months to half that - £600. (I jumped at the opportunity, wish now I'd bought a third set, - of 8x44's)

Would they have been making a loss? I'm guessing they would have been selling at about production cost + dealer profit? Maybe £500 + £100?
 
The link below gives an account of an excellent model which lost money for the maker because of pricing. It could not create a niche, nor be "adjusted down" to the competition because of the basic construction.

http://www.epinions.com/review/elec..._8x25_Mountaineer_II_ATB/content_217566056068.

It was, not surprisingly, wonderful value for money, and I used one for 10 yrs, beofre giving it away to a younger bird watcher. It seems there are still a handful available through the internet. There's also a 10x version but this did not work so well for myself and several others who tried it out.
 
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Two thoughts from the manufacturer/distributor side of things:

1. From, FrankD's early post in this thread, if a company is allowing $300 of $900 as warranty it needs to change its factory and/or QC process (or fire the guy that contracted the product in the first place)! At worst we have seen products arrive from Chinese suppliers that suffer 20% inbound QC failure based on 100% initial product batch sampling (and anything that approaches a double-digit inspection failure is not put up for sale but rather put on a boat back to whence it came). I'd estimate somewhere between 2% and 5% of the margin for a manufacturer would be allocated to cover warranty costs over the lifetime of a binocular depending on the source, specification, warranty offering etc. That figure might need to approach 10% if the warranty was a "no fault lifetime" warranty for example. Those are also pretty typical of the consumer electronics industry if memory serves me well enough from my time in that business.

2. In the TV industry, the alpha brands are large corporates with big marketing budgets, lots of owned factories and lots of people with big salaries and need double digit profit margins - many are failing to achieve that (see Sony's TV business as good example). A lean, mean, middle market brand can survive and indeed thrive with SG&A costs of under 2% and similar reverse logistics costs (see Vizio as a prime example of a lean company that came from nowhere to be the #1 brand by volume in the US TV market).

So I suppose, one size does not fit all is what I'm trying to say :)

Cheers, Pete
 
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