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How Low Will They Go ?


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Strick

 You can't have too many detectors. You need some to hunt with but you need others to hold up the walls in your home. It's like a friend says and he loves guns. If he buys a gun he may never shoot it but he's got one and he can sit enjoy just looking at it. I'd say I'm the same way about detectors.

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Chuck 

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Well all I can say is it is about time. The norm in most consumer electronics is a rapid move to more power at lower prices. The metal detector world moves very slowly by comparison, and if anything the average price has gone up in the last 15 years. First it seemed like over $1000 was a lot for a detector. Then it was over $2000. And who ever thought we would be seeing consumer type detecting devices going for over $5000!

There is a certain degree of market saturation occurring now along with ever fiercer competition. For probably the last twenty years I have told people the sweet spot for horsepower and price was around $700 in VLF machines. PI gold machines did nothing but go up, but the dam finally burst there and we have seen dramatic price decreases from Minelab the last couple years.

And now with a push coming primarily from Nokta/Makro and First Texas we are seeing the new bang for the buck range in VLF drop to about $500. It is going to be very hard with VLF machines in particular to hold any sort of price premium going forward. I think PI detectors will also see more competition and lower price units soon. All in all, a good time to be buying metal detectors. Not a good time to hang on to old models as they are not going to hold value like they once did.

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On 3/25/2017 at 9:35 PM, Steve Herschbach said:

Well all I can say is it is about time. The norm in most consumer electronics is a rapid move to more power at lower prices. The metal detector world moves very slowly by comparison, and if anything the average price has gone up in the last 15 years. First it seemed like over $1000 was a lot for a detector. Then it was over $2000. And who ever thought we would be seeing consumer type detecting devices going for over $5000!

I was thinking about this the other day while driving.  In summer of 1979 I bought a new Garrett GroundHog with 8 inch coil for ~$800 and then paid another $100 for the big coil (11 inch round coplanar).  The US Consumer Price Index was 74 then and about 244 now -- a factor of 3.3 increase in 38 years.  So that $800/$900 outlay in '79 translates to $2500-$2800 today -- about the cost of a Minelab CTX-3030 or GPX-4500.

I was looking at a used detector this morning -- $550 price tag, and I thought "that's a lot of money".  I make 4x what I did back in 1979, and I don't think I blinked buying that Groundhog.  Funny how our views change with time.

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