Why are primary lights so expensive?

[KeithG]

I suppose that's true. My other hobby is RC aircraft (planes and quads). Spektrum is one of the leading suppliers of radio equipment. From what I can tell, all their Tx/Rx components are made in China. In the last few years you can find several suppliers of 'Clone' parts and 'Compatible' parts. Some are hard to differentiate from the originals, but some are unique designs that are quite different, but function as well (or better) than originals. I the 30+ years if flying RC models, I have had only 1 radio failure that resulted in a pretty bad crash. It was from a locally purchased Spektrum branded radio Rx that turned out to be from a known defect.

Know, consider that Rx(receiver) costs around $70 usd, when you can easily find a clone/compatible Rx(receiver) for well under $20 online. I currently own and use both. ..Have equal confidence in both. You can make the 'living wage' argument all you want, but the reality is most people will typically choose $20 over $70 if the items prove to be comparable.

Does this apply to dive lighting? Somewhat. I have tried a couple cheap Chinese backup lights and both flooded within 10 dives. I know there are folks on here that have had good success with some versions. I currently own 3 primary lights, (DR, and AUL) and 6 backups (Dr and Hollis). I suspect the backup lights are re-branded off-shore makes of some sort, but they are at least backed by a US based company.

I agree, but you do need to distinguish between "engineering" and "manufacturing". If the product has been well designed then it can be manufactured anyplace that will provide the proper quality control. If the product is incorrectly engineered, then it will be crap regardless of where it is made or what quality of parts goes into it.

I have experience with expensive and cheap "made in china" dive lights. The expensive one has a properly engineered oring sealing system. I am confident it will never flood. The cheap one(s) all had faulty oring seal designs (not a material issue!) and flooded when stressed in a test chamber. On trips I have also seen a few of the poor design lights last "a few" dives before they flooded. These people got lucky on the first few dives, reality eventually won out.

Proper engineering design takes time and money, and will be a large factor of the price for low volume items.

 

[victorzamora]

Great thread! Thanks for sharing, Bobby. I've often wondered about the issue myself and now we've got some ballpark figures to explain the cost. That is a rare thing to see shared by any manufacturer.

Given the markups seen on other dive gear, I had assumed there were massive profits with lights as well. Obviously not, at least not for UWLD lights.

I've got a few manufacturer's price sheets for their dealers and I'll tell you that most things we consider "tech" gear are low on markup. In general terms, fancy snorkels are the highest percentage markup (often over 100%). Then fancy fins and most masks have high markups. Rec BCDs have much higher markups than BPWs, recreational lights have higher markups than tech lights. Regs also have varying degrees of markup depending on a bunch of factors. Scooters, canister lights, rebreathers, and other "specialty" tech gear have much, much lower margins. All of that is dealer price vs MSRP/MAP, which is different from why dealer cost is so high...but it gives you an idea that the tech market doesn't have quite the mark-up many other industries have. Couches are known to have >400% markups due to the overhead associated with their size. Cat5 cables are known to have almost zero markup....but HDMI cables frequently have 1000%+ markups.

I suppose that's true. My other hobby is RC aircraft (planes and quads). Spektrum is one of the leading suppliers of radio equipment. From what I can tell, all their Tx/Rx components are made in China. In the last few years you can find several suppliers of 'Clone' parts and 'Compatible' parts. Some are hard to differentiate from the originals, but some are unique designs that are quite different, but function as well (or better) than originals. I the 30+ years if flying RC models, I have had only 1 radio failure that resulted in a pretty bad crash. It was from a locally purchased Spektrum branded radio Rx that turned out to be from a known defect.

I'm assuming the "clones" you're talking about are the OrangeRX ones....and that the "known issue" was the Spektrum brown-outs from a few years ago? RC aircraft have been my other hobby (and were my main hobby) for years. HobbyKing (and similar sites) has made the electric aircraft portion of the hobby dramatically different in that they have very high-performance things direct from the Mfg with a dramatically lower price. What's interesting is the scale of things....and this is my tie-in back to scuba. The 3S 2200mAh packs that are so common are WAY cheaper than the expensive ones, but the more specialty stuff isn't as cheap....even from those Discount sites. The TRex clones offer no improvement over the originals and leech off of the R&D Align puts in. The quality on the Align stuff is definitely better, but the gap is closing quickly. The scales of all those things, though, are still much, much higher than high-end dive gear like Canister lights.

 

[lucca brassi]

Well, it's not just the Chinese. Lots of stuff is being copied by 'newer' companies in eastern Europe. I don't wanna name names, but some companies over there don't do anything but copy stuff other people have come up with.

well trully i don't think so , they take old design and use new components ( for instance test tube diving light is not Halcyon patent or something because that design is somewhere 1900 or something ( i have somewhere US patent ) if you mean lights like yellowldiving.eu from polland

but many of them developed their own concept ( like northern light , scubamafia , new thor....

but true it is very interesting why Poland made so many quality scuba equipment (light for me , santi , xdeep bottomtimer , tecline by scubatech....)

PS: xdeep BT needs only more mileage ;-) ; it is not so bad

 

[Bennno]

but true it is very interesting why Poland made so many quality scuba equipment (light for me , santi , xdeep bottomtimer , tecline by scubatech....)

Lol, that's the first time I heard anyone say the xdeep bt is a quality product. Aren't the tecline regs apex clones? Their SM rig doesn't look like a original design either.

 

[Caveeagle]

I'm assuming the "clones" you're talking about are the OrangeRX ones....and that the "known issue" was the Spektrum brown-outs from a few years ago? RC aircraft have been my other hobby (and were my main hobby) for years. HobbyKing (and similar sites) has made the electric aircraft portion of the hobby dramatically different in that they have very high-performance things direct from the Mfg with a dramatically lower price. What's interesting is the scale of things....and this is my tie-in back to scuba. The 3S 2200mAh packs that are so common are WAY cheaper than the expensive ones, but the more specialty stuff isn't as cheap....even from those Discount sites. The TRex clones offer no improvement over the originals and leech off of the R&D Align puts in. The quality on the Align stuff is definitely better, but the gap is closing quickly. The scales of all those things, though, are still much, much higher than high-end dive gear like Canister lights.

I have not used the OrangeRx units, but yes those are one of the most common. They might be 'clones' from an engineering perspective, but I was thinking of some of those out there that actually have face Spektrum badging on sites like TargetHobby. I have a few I purchased from LemonRX, and they seem to work well for park flyers.

It was a Spektrum AR500 that was sold to me at our local hobby store. Wrecked by son's Dynaflight Butterfly on its 5th flight. The club president was watching and inspected the plane post-crash. IIRC, the Rx was blinking, indication a lost signal (brown out). Spektrum (HH) did sent me a replacement radio with the AR600 receiver, but offered no compensation for the wrecked plane.

I know this is off topic, but I see it as an example of where domestic companies MUST excel at customer service if they hope to have any credibility with customers today. From what I can tell, Dive Rite, Light Monkey and UWLD all seem to be doing their best to exceed customer expectations. ..Which is obviously good for us.

I think Hollis is the only brand where I have gotten poor response for product quality issues, so I tend to avoid them... for the most part.

 

[Bobby]

Stop saying 'kid'. A ton of grown up people work at McDonalds.
This automation argument is silly. Every company is going to automate even if worker only make 6 bucks an hour. Automation is always cheaper. It's a strawman argument.

I have a few decades of automated manufacturing experience at many levels. This statement is completely wrong. I've worked in union, non-union, & international manufacturing. The cost of labor has everything to do with the level of automation.

In union facilities companies have invested billions of dollars into "no touch lines" due to the high cost of labor. Countries like China will use 20 people to do the job instead of one machine and one person due to the low cost of labor. The automated machines that they do invest in are more about meeting regulatory requirements, in countries such as the US, to export their products rather than the cost of labor.

Most companies make an investment decision (loosely based) on a 2 year ROI. When costs, including labor, make that payback in 2 years then the project is a go. Raise wages to that ROI point and it becomes an easy trigger to pull. When I worked in corporate lighting a lot of what we did was retrofit lighting systems for big corporations. The cost of electricity drove the companies to retrofit to more automated and more efficient lighting systems. It is a simple matter of profitability over X amount of time. In saying that is also rather complex determining that ROI as well.

Government regulation also has a lot to do with labor cost and automation. In the US we have OSHA, workmen's compensation, & unemployment. In other countries they kill 10 workers per year in a particularly dangerous position, fire people at will, and have a huge pool of potential employees that will work for virtually nothing because it is more than what they have now, which is nothing. Leveling the field through tariffs is one way, not the only way, of balancing out the issue. To have a true free trade system though the balances need to be in place. Otherwise the only benefit is to the people at the top of large international companies and the politicians that get their pockets lined for making laws that allow those companies to exploit cheap unregulated labor.

Look at the past few decades here in the US. What do we see? The top earners have exponentially grown their income while the remaining 90% have stagnated or gone down. Seems that there is a correlation with exporting our manufacturing to countries with cheaper labor and lower regulation. However some believe that higher wages and more regulation here in the US is going to be the solution. Is that logical? I work for less than $15 per hour, hell I work for less than minimum wage sometimes. That is my choice as a small business owner in the hopes that it will pay off for me down the road. Maybe we should regulate how much I must pay myself as a small business and just put me out of my misery now.

 

[Rred]

I suspect dive lights have become expensive because "divers" used to be fairly "Can do !" guys who actually made, maintained, and published guides for others. 20-30 years ago, DIY HID lights were a big thing before LEDs became bright enough and cheap enough for anything.

Today? Most divers are fairly wealthy "consumer adventurers". No offense to anyone here, but most divers wouldn't know how to patch a pinhole in their BCs, much less how to build a flashlight. Plans for DIY underwater housings were common, and Ikelite would even sell you the fittings to make your own. Today? There are enough wealthy folks who don't know why you can't use Elmer's Glue on plexiglass, so there's a nice niche business making high power lights for them.

Sorry, but that's the way the diving industry has wanted things to go.

 

[drrich2]

I suspect more divers are doing more potentially dangerous dives than was the case decades back, such as deep cave penetrations. Do any of you cave divers want to to lengthy cave penetration with home-made dive lights?

Richard.

P.S.: "My point was that: If you are doing a full time job you should be able to live off of it."

1.) Not every task to be done is worth that much, in 40 hours. Some jobs are worth enough to give teenagers on summer break pocket money. Not a car, apartment and health insurance.

2.) 'Able to live off it' is very vague. Are we talking a homeless person living out of shelters using it to buy food, pay to bathe at a truck stop, etc...? Or enable the person to get a cheap apartment in a bad part of town with a similar room mate and eke out a subsistence living? Or is he supposed to be able to independently afford a solo apartment or trailer rental, t.v. with cable, a cell phone, furniture, broadband internet service, health insurance, a cheap car or where available public transportation, etc...? In each instance, someone is 'able to live off it.'

 

[Rred]

A "home made" dive light is very possibly the exact same quality as the "made by a niche company that isn't mass producing things but is having a couple of the cheapest laborers make them by hand".

Just because someone was hired, with economic pressure to pay less, and worked in a factory instead of a home workshop, forced to work when hungover, distracted, interrupted, or coming down with the flu? You think that guy in the small company, not using a production line, not using ISO9000 techniques, is any better?

Apple computers were not the only product built by a couple of guys in a garage. In fact, not so long ago? Almost all SCUBA equipment was cobbled together from military surplus parts, by guys in basements.

We learned how to build flashlights in fourth grade. Learning how to build waterproof enclosures? Takes a slightly higher skill set. But even an ordinary peanut butter jar stays waterproof at 100 feet. Or perhaps, you've never recovered a wine or booze bottle from that depth. Eventually the cork leaks--but screw caps don't. It ain't rocket science. And very few companies have the courage and confidence to offer lifetime warranties. Very few.

 

[drrich2]

A commercial product will have sold quite a few units then used by a number of other people before I get one. The unit-to-unit product consistency will likely be higher than that of a home-made unit (especially since the latter may be the only one made).

Therefore, the commercial product will have had numerous opportunities to kill users before I get one. It's been field-tested, so to speak. Plus, the company has liability concerns.

A home-made light, on the other hand? None of that's true. And how many divers are qualified to match the reputable products being discussed as primary lights in this thread?

People making their own lights for demanding dives...wonder how many divers do this?

Richard.