Imagine you purchased a work truck in 1999. You do regular maintenance, and it doesn’t give you any trouble for the first eight years. In 2006, you stopped bothering to change the truck’s oil. You drive it for another 10 years and, remarkably, you don’t have any problems. In 2017 you decide to upgrade, but not because you need to. The truck still runs great, you just want to see what advancements have been made. You then trade in your old truck for a new one with much better gas mileage, collision avoidance, lane departure warning, cruise control, satellite radio, and many other modern features. You also spend about the same amount as you did in 1999.
While a truck manufacturer might be shocked if a customer traded in a working vehicle that hadn’t seen an oil change in ten years, this situation shouldn’t be surprising for a videoscope manufacturer, like Olympus.
We recently received this working videoscope (IV12D4-60) as a trade in from a customer who manufactures chemicals. Yes, that is a VCR recorder and CRT monitor.
This unit was produced in 1993–1999, and its service life ended in 2007. This means that parts for the system were not available after 2007. However, this ended up not being an issue as the videoscope kept on working.
After at least 18 years of using this videoscope for their visual inspections, the final ten years without sending it in for service, our customer decided to trade in their working IV12D4-60 videoscope and upgraded to an IPLEX® NX videoscope.
This old videoscope and other older models still being used in the field are a testament to the durability of Olympus videoscopes. With the proper care and maintenance, this piece of industrial equipment can last for decades. How often do you see a piece of equipment still in use, but is so old you might actually get nostalgic?
One benefit of the durable design of Olympus videoscopes is that it helps keep the service cost low. For example, the average three-year service cost for our US customers who purchase an IPLEX RT/RX videoscope is about 4% of the purchase price. This covers all IPLEX RT/RX videoscopes sold in the US over the last three years (since September 2017), including service due to improper use.* So going back to our truck analogy, if you purchased your truck for $30,000, 4% for total service costs is only $1,200.
Of course, since our videoscopes are used in different applications and different industries, there is going to be some variation in the 4% service cost average. But even if your service costs double to 8%, it’s still a relatively small cost.
Perhaps the most important benefit that our rugged videoscopes provide is reliability. Just like any tool, such as your work truck, the cost of downtime can be expensive. With videoscopes designed to resist dust, water, dropping, and extreme hot and cold temperatures, they’re built to maximize uptime, even in difficult environments. When you combine the low average cost of maintenance with minimal downtime, the result is a videoscope that’s capable of carrying the workload for many years. We hope that many years down the road when you move on to your next videoscope, you’ll feel that same sense of nostalgia.
*Total calculated as the total amount spent by customers on service for the IPLEX RT/RX videoscope divided by the total spent for purchasing IPLEX RT/RX videoscopes in the United States.
IPLEX is a registered trademark of Olympus Corporation.
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