L brackets, quality & price?

[tirediron]

The Chinese metal procurement specialists at Brackets R Us probably take exception to the way you so dismissively brush off their scrap heaps! Errrr.... I mean their supply heaps...errr, I mean, their carefully racked supplies of low-grade metal stock...

Are you referring to People's Machine Works #6, Shanghai?

I was actually envisioning the fellows that work at Consolidated Retail Assembly Parts Works #'s 1 thru 44.

Right... that's the home of "Inspector #56"!

 

[table1349]

No doubt.
An L bracket is a pretty simple piece of kit.

Anyone wondering how the pricing can vary so much only needs to look at Apple products, and Apple's bank balance.
Lots of people will pay out the wazoo for some shine, some hype, and a brand name.
Cha-Ching ! ! !

People pay for what is called perceived value which in fact has little to nothing to do with actual value. The idea is that if they are charging so much for it, it must be worth it. It isn't usually.
As artists my wife and I saw this in 2006 when the housing market crashed and people stopped buying art in the 1-10,000 dollar range, but the 50,000 and up range never lost a beat, sales never stalled in that area, so the obvious answer was to re-price all our art and we never had to deal with declining sales.

Granted, there is some price premium for the RRS and Kirk gear, but a LOT of what you're paying for is both quality and quality control, in other words not only are the dimension and tolerances going to be a LOT better in the $150 product, they're going to make sure that no 'oopses' leave the factory.

I'll again trot out the story I've posted before of my brothers dabble in 'economy'. He wanted a set of extension tubes, but wasn't quite ready to shell out the $150 for the Kenko tubes, so opted for a $30 MiC set. They looked great, seemed to be reasonably well made, and the first one mounted on to the camera body with zero issue, but... it wouldn't come off. Nope, no way, not a friggin' hope. He wound up spending quite a few dollars at the local repair store (a hacksaw was involved) and now has a nice set of perfectly functioning Kenko tubes and a nice souvenir bill.

A higher price isn't always worth the cost, but more often than not, there's a reason for it.

But if you do get an 'oops' you just return it to Amazon and get another a day later.

And Amazon will replace the $6,000.00 camera body and $2,000.00 lens from the oops? NO!