Why do Astro mounts cost so much ???

[SkyExplorer]

Just been wondering why things like the HEQ5 (£800) and NEQ6 (£1000) mounts cost the amount they cost.....

There is nothing cutting edge in them, just some stainless steel for legs etc, a few gears and motors and a few circuit boards. The handset is not cutting edge either, just a plastic body covering a circuit board (there is not even a battery in there to keep the date/time).

If these mounts say had built in gps, gyroscopes (smart phones have these now) then that would allow fully automated setup and tracking, wireless, USB ports (aka a hub) on them then maybe the cost could be justified.

Anyway, to me they seem very expensive for what they are when you actually start to think what they consist of.

Steve

[pete_l]

Two sorts of reasons.

The easy one is that they charge what the market can bear. There's a range of mounts at different price-points, which ones are most popular depends more on the perceived value than on the cost of manufacture. It's not a particularly competitive market, so manufacturers tend to charge what they think they can get away with. If sales drop, they either increase the advertising, or drop the price a little.

The other answer is that all the electronics "features" are really quite cheap to produce. There's very little material in them, transport and shelf-space costs are small and the components are made by the million (and fabrication is almost entirely automated, too). However, the mechanical bits do require some degree of manual input - which costs: even at chinese wages. Plus the production runs are small, so tooling costs are a larger chunk of the overall production cost. Add onto that the cost of packaging a big item, transporting it and (probably the most expensive bit) getting it from the docks to the showroom.

On an unrelated topic, I have heard it said that a particular brand of satellite dish (basically just some pressed steel, powder coated) has a factory gate price of about $30. By the time it gets out of the shop and into your car, it's gone up to £180 with all the overheadss and various profit margins.

[rowan46]

their scarcity keeps the price high if they were selling as many mounts as ipods they would be a lot cheaper

[themos]

There is nothing cutting edge in them, just some stainless steel for legs etc, a few gears and motors and a few circuit boards.

Great, we're all looking forward to buying your EQ6-clone mount for £400!

[shaunster]

It helps if you dont buy from expensive places

HEQ5 = £709 and NEQ6 = £889 from FLO...

[Psychobilly]

HEQ5-£5

[Whippy]

their scarcity keeps the price high if they were selling as many mounts as ipods they would be a lot cheaper

Spot on, It's down to economies of scale. If astronomy was as popular as say, video gaming then kit would be cheaper. If all they were as simple as the OP thinks they are then I'm hoping the new astrotrac GEM is going to be cheap as chips especially as they haven't got to be shipped form China .

If you think HEQ5's/EQ6's are expensive, then take a look at Paramounts and Takahashi models!

Tony..

[nightfisher]

if you strip a mount down there is a lot of components, with a fair amount of machining involved, plus the cost of castings

[Earl]

They are overpriced, and id guess cost around £150 - £200 (eq6) to make, then after everyone has there cut, id guess the retailer makes the smallest amount.

There is a opening for a mount to go against the EQ6 as it has plenty of issues.

I would love to make my own mount, but a) dont have the skills, the time.

Im not saying I couldnt do it, (nothing is impossible) but for the effort and more importantly the time its easier to buy one.

[klytus]

In my opinion it strikes me the only reason why astronomy equipment is so expensive is because it was and still is considered shall we say a 'rich mans' hobby just as amateur radio equipment and high end personal computer systems were and still are. Therefore manufacturers of the above can within reason charge whatever they like and get away with it.

I mean when you think about what Prof Cox's beeb program recently did for astronomy and its equipment manufacturers you'd have thought prices should have dropped....now i've just gone and shot myself in the foot have'nt i . Higher demand means more scarcity means low stock levels means high prices...Steve shut up

[red dwalf]

lets be honest, anything which is considered to be a hobby and the equipment is expensive, my other hobby is Golf, no comments please against Golfers, and the price of clubs, bags etc etc never seems to go down, they just bring out updated models which promise the earth but don`t deliver, then the price of playing the courses, i`ve paid over £100 for a round of golf, don`t tell the wife, and didn`t even get a free drink at the end of it.

[Glider]

Try buying a season ticket and then the cost of going to away matches!!!!!

[SkyExplorer]

wow, lots of replies

I can see the point about supply and demand and lower demand means higher prices as fewer mounts are made. But a £1000 srp for a EQ6 !! (yes FLO sells them cheaper I know)

Synta must sell thousands of these mounts world wide each year, I think I'd buy into this point if they were only selling these mounts in the UK.

I was looking at my HEQ5 the other day and wondered how it could have a srp of £800. After all there is not much more to it compared to the standard EQ5 that can justify an extra £570

[Capricorn]

As Whippy said Economy of scale.

Where I work as best I and others know just one person has an HEQ5, me.

450-500 have mobile phones with the app on that you mention. One person I work with has 3 of them. The company is about 600 strong.

Also electronics are relatively cheap, think that GPS is a small receiver and chip with all the firmware as standard. Buy 20 million and you get one hell of a good price, assembly is by a robotic system.

The EQ mounts are asembled by a peson somewhere and slower and not so cheap.

How many HEQ5's in the UK?

Guess less then 5000.

How many new generation mobiles?

Say 20 million.

[SkyExplorer]

yeah I understand that bit, maybe synta sell more EQ5 mounts than HEQ5 mounts then as there a big difference in price between the two.

Just wondering why the EQ3-2/5 goto upgrade kit is nearly £300 as that comprises of a few electronic parts, 2 motors and a hand controller.

I know, I'm in an expensive hobby I - I must not question the price and keep buying these expensive items

[Glider]

SWC for manufacturer £200, distributor buys for £400, end user pays £800.

[John S]

There is a website by an expert machinist / hobbyist and after he made a mount capable of tracking to sub 10 arcseconds he felt the amount of time and work involved etc would cost more than buying a mount.

To track at less than 10 arcseconds requires just one component the wormwheel accuracy of the highest machining skill which is why we have tracking and PEC to compensate for errors too expensive and time consuming to remove.

The HEQ5 is a Chinese copy of a Takahashi mount whioch costs thousands.

John.

[NickK]

Also I think people are stuck on cost-based pricing. (I'd agree with the valuation of the astro market being seen is one of the rich's hobbies - it's expected that a mount is <700 low, ~700-2000 med, ~2000+ high)

Many factors - including perceived value and brand value also play a part in addition to the basic demand, R&D and cost to manufacture.

A takahashi MT200 will have had a certain premium to maintain it's elite status and brand reputation. Naturally there will be a higher cost to drive the excellence by a higher R&D cost. Naturally you pay for it. As the mount represents a high value asset, it makes sense to ensure the quality is high throughout the lifetime of the product offering. To have a Tak fall apart after a year would be terminal to the business.

An HEQ1/2/3/4/5/6 are basically mass produced with a comparatively small R&D cost (if the alleged plagiarism is correct). Naturally the business model is to drive down costs to increase margins with the predictable impact on quality over a period of time. The mount isn't a high cost.. so you'll buy another mount in two years.

So depend on the positioning and business model of the business and the product portfolio influencing the final product in your hand. After all you 'vote' with your wallet for the most popular mount (regardless of being rich or not).

(spoken like a product manager... ahem..)

Personally I'll take a mount that satisfies the requirements and has a reputation of being solidly dependable. The result is expensive

[Astro_Baby]

I dont think they are that expensive personally (and I am not rich by any means). Theres a fair bit of hand assembly in a mount for a start.

Take it back to basics... you have to finance a company and hire workers - straight away you have overheads, the bank wants a cut and the workers want paying. You have a cost of materials, cost of assembly, someone has to design it, advertise it, sell it, it has to be shipped (and they arent light), they have to be supported to some extent, you have taxes both on your manufacturing and importing. It all adds up.

At the end of all your costs you have a small market to sell to. Markup on tis stuff probably isnt a great deal in % compared to an iPod which probably costs very little to manufacture by comparison. Same with mobile phones there really isn't a great deal of assembly work required. Flow solder the main board, bit of assembly to solder a few wires on, bung it in a plastic case which is formed up and stick it in a box. I have worked on electronic products where the packaging cost more than the product inside.

Personally I doubt for a one off you could ever make an EQ6 equivalent as cheap.

The EQ6 doesn't really have that many issues. Most can be fixed easily enough and all things considered I am always amazed how cheap they are. Look back to telescopes of the 1970s and 1980s and you'd have really needed deep pockets.

[Macavity]

I think the rather irritating thing is that the manufacturers seem determined to "spoil the ship for a hap'orth of TAR" - Or, if Skywatcher, smear this liberally onto everything that moves, as a lubricant. [part serious] But, without personal experience in mechanical engineering, some of the basic design seems a tad heath-robinson, even flawed. Potential functionality - setting circles etc. is/are needlessly rendered ornamental IMO...

But similar frustrations exist(ed) with my Ioptron. Functionality was somewhat dodgy, until I added a (first!) touch of lubricant. It is anecdotal that LOADING capacity can be significantly increased, by replacing the axes bearings with slightly(?) more expensive ones etc. This of course supports something of a (fair enough!) cottage industry. But one must ask, whether this would be acceptable in other consumer products... e.g. road-worthy vehicles etc.

[SkyExplorer]

Yep I agree that for a one off cost you could not better a eq6. However 2 points

1. Just done a quick search and it looks like the EQ6 has been around since 2003 (could be wrong here), lets say they (synta, so Orion, SW, etc) sell 3000 units worldwide a year, so 8 years is 24,000 units, so a total of £24,000,000 (rough guess). Would they have made up their R&D costs, tooling costs etc in this time selling this amount of units?

2. To compare a EQ5 to HEQ5, with an EQ5 you need someone to assemble that, it also needs shipping and weighs only slightly less than HEQ5. It uses the same tripod and weights as an HEQ5, the only bit that is different is the mount (body) however its £570 more expensive.

Sorry for keep on banging the drum......

[Glider]

On point 2. Isn't the HEQ5 significantly different to the EQ5 because it has the motors design internally? Doesn't this make the enclosures and housings totally different?

[adamsp123]

A couple of points I would like to make... I do think semi specialist hobby equipment can be sold at higher than average mark ups, I remember how much I paid for my skis years ago only to find out they cost less than 10 quid to actually fabricate ditto golf bats etc. etc

Added to this equation though is that any development/sales/support costs are going to be spread over a relatively few units which will add significantly to the end user costs.

[NickK]

£24M is a decent revenue target. Don't forget that they will share R&D costs across products.

Also once the initial cost of the platform is developed, it's usually a small incremental "innovation" between models with last year's top features migrating down the value chain to the cheaper models. The new top models then have better X, Y and possibly the addition of a true new R&D feature or two.

Yes, the EQ series as a whole may make say £100M in revenue (we're ignoring discount pricing here) and the R&D of the entire range originally may have cost £3M depending where you R&D'd it globally.

Over that period, there's pressure on suppliers to reduce costs so manufacturing will be come more streamlined. Add to that contracting out the majority of the design aspects would result in a capex cost rather than a continuing opex cost hitting the bottom line since 2003..

In the end doing something once is effectively R&D from scratch. It's also the most expensive way of building something. Depending on your expertise and experience you may find that it isn't as good either.

However DIY is really about enjoying the process of creating what you want and it may cost more in the long run but that's not why DIYers do it.

If you want to watch the stars buy a mount. If you want to DIY on cloudy days, buy a mount for the clear nights as it's certainly going to take you longer than you'd expect (not forgetting family time/financial pressures over the period of building it).

[John S]

The EQ2,3 are Chinese clones of The Japanese Polaris mounts. The EQ5 is a clone of the Super Polaris without motors which were extra all old technology plastic bearings now replaced with ball bearings.

The HEQ5 and EQ6 are Chinese clones of Japanese Takahashi mounts thrust and roller bearings etc with inbuilt motors and handsets Different class.

The Chinese are not stupid they know what we want and are prepared to pay. They have taken over the market for telescopes and mounts.

I personally think the EQ5 is utilitarian the HEQ5 is a thing of engineering beauty. The EQ6 beauty and the beast all in one.

John.