Optical quality injection moulding dies for Acrylic lenses don't come cheap.
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Thanks, -many of our customers dont really know if they want to buy lamps or not….as such they certainly don’t want to spend any significant money at all, and will just disappear if there’s any kind of long-ish lead time.......eg it may be for a company’s outdoor verandas .. where the lamp will hardly be used, if ever at all……..one was a school where they hold a ball for the parents once every year, and the marquee was put in the school field, so they literally needed lamps going down to the marquee site…which get used literally once per year!……….if the lamps skimp on certain reliability features to get rock bottom cheap, then the customers are happy because we give them a 5 year warrantee and they are happy to be sent a replacement should one fail…after all, they’ve got a few months before they need to replace any non-working ones!......so they want something really really rock bottom cheap. Very often they may want to keep an option to redevelop the site……in which case they would tear the lamps down and never use them again . As such, the name of the game in this particular market is “do it cheap, do it small”….and smaller means less space in storage.
Quite frankly, if we offer them one of our all singing and dancing super_mains_transient_withstand , super_efficient_lamps, they really could not be less interested. They just do not want to know.
In this case, I wonder if there is a cheap way of manufacturing a “very general optic” for a multiple LED PCB? A cheap optic which could be used for multiple LEDs.
…ie the light spread would be very imperfect, but perfectly satisfactory for their purpose.
In your situation, I would say the exec's had enough drama and is looking for an excuse to drop the product.
Thanks, i must admit though, that my company has a huge cohort of products out in the field, in some places with zero reject rate after 2 years, and the customers are very very happy. They dont want to go with anyone else but us.
I would confess that from an academic engineering viewpoint, some of our products are hardly the golden egg for a Brunelian engineer.....and engineers dont absolutely clamour to work on this kind of stuff...but many customers love us and love our products....because in many cases ,we give them exactly what they want.
I definetely think that their is often a disconnect between what customers really want and what engineers think they should have.