Trotec Speedy 300 Pricing: Trade Show vs. Sawmill Creek Pricing

[Mike Null]

My experience in buying my first laser, a ULS which I had made up my mind to buy, wasn't much different. I had to drive to Chicago to make the purchase as there was no ULS rep in St. Louis and the factory sales mgr. was useless.

When I decided to buy a second machine I looked at the features very carefully of all machines and requested quotes. ULS not only didn't have a rep in St. Louis but they didn't have a rep that I could contact in this hemisphere so I contacted the factory again. Their quote was well above anything I had received from the other two. Epilog has a very attentive rep in the Missouri market and he was all over the rfq. Trotec responded with the Missouri rep and he arranged for me to see a couple of machines in operation in local shops.

At the time Trotec was fairly new to the US and just getting started. Their quote was higher than Epilog but lower than ULS. This was more than 6 years ago and machines were much higher priced at that time. I had made up my mind that the Trotec was the machine I wanted even with the price and I was unable to negotiate anything lower. In the meantime Epilog's rep advised that the factory (he gave me the name of an executive) wanted the order and he was going to lower my price a lot--they were already the lowest. Still, in one of my better decisions, I chose Trotec, as I believed it to be a superior machine. ( I also looked at Xenetech but quickly determined I wanted nothing to do with that brand.)

Given the performance of my Trotec and the outstanding tech support in using the many features of the machine and software I would buy another without considering other brands. (mine is in it's 7th year with zero downtime and zero parts replacement)