original price of Fluke 5440B in the 80s

[e61_phil]

Hi,

does anyone know the original price of a new Fluke 5440B before the Fluke 5700A was introduced?

I found a lot about my HP 3456A (about 6000$) but nothing about Fluke calibrators.

Thanks
Philipp

[Bill158]

Hi,

does anyone know the original price of a new Fluke 5440B before the Fluke 5700A was introduced?

I found a lot about my HP 3456A (about 6000$) but nothing about Fluke calibrators.

Thanks
Philipp

Philipp:

The Fluke 1985 catalog has the price of the basic 5440B as $12,950.  The spec pages show the 5440B as a "NEW" item so I would guess that this would be the year that the 5440B was introduced.  Hope this helps.
Bill

[e61_phil]

Thanks

Very interesting. I would have thought that a calibrator was much more expensive than a precision DMM even in the 80s.

I was wrong with the 3456A. It costs $4100 in the catalog from 1987.  ($1200 more than an 3457A, but the 3456A has better specs and specified transfer). In 1989 the 3458A was introduced for $6000.

Today, you don't get a Fluke calibrator for the price of two 3458A

[zlymex]

Most of today's calibrators are multi-functional while 5440B was only for voltage.
There was a manual of 5440A dated March 1983, 5440B must be first introduced later than that.
At that time(or before), Fluke had already been selling 720A and 752A, and now they are still selling them after some 30 or 40 years.

[e61_phil]

Ok, if you sum up the prices of 5440B, 5450A, 5200A and 5220A and compare that to the price of a 5700A. The 5700A probably seems to be cheap.

[EmmanuelFaure]

Guys... Money doesn't travel from one decade to another seamlessly. What about the inflation?

The Fluke 1985 catalog has the price of the basic 5440B as $12,950.

$28.800 in 2015's dollars.

I was wrong with the 3456A. It costs $4100 in the catalog from 1987.  ($1200 more than an 3457A, but the 3456A has better specs and specified transfer). In 1989 the 3458A was introduced for $6000.

3456A : $8600 in 2015's dollars.
3458A : $11600 in 2015's dollars.

[Bill158]

Today, you don't get a Fluke calibrator for the price of two 3458A

One factor you have consider when pricing a product is "How many of these do I expect to sell, over the lifetime of the product?".  I am sure that HP predicted that they would sell a LOT of 3456A/3458A DVMs.  So the development costs are spread over all of the DVMs sold (which were probably many 10s of thousands).  How many 5700A units can you sell over it's lifetime?  If the sales hit 5,000 over the lifetime I would be very surprised.
I worked for a company which made automatic test equipment for discrete semiconductors, i.e transistors, fets, diodes and so on.  I think we may have sold 600 test systems over it's entire lifetime, which included many, many engineering changes and upgrades to the basic design.  Our rule of thumb was to take the material and labor costs of the system and multiply by 3 and that was the sales price.  So if the materials and labor cost $30,000, we priced the system at $90,000.
Bill