Friday, December 14, 2007

Cintiq 12wx: Not so grand fer canucks...



O.k., this really gives me the shits. Wacom comes out with an awesome new bit of kit, the sketchbook-sized Cintiq 12wx, which reviewers say is the greatest thing since bananas met peanut butter. 'Cept Wacom don't ship to beaver-land, and Canadian resellers, gentle, helpful upstanding souls all, have taken the opportunity to fleece the ever-luvin' hell out of their countrymen. The 12wx retails for $999 bucks stateside and our dollars are almost at par. Yet check out the markups...as little as 70 bucks and as much as 300 over the retail. Nice. I emailed Wacom...I'll letch'all know what they has to says. More later.

UPDATE: Teach me to jump to the conclusions. Got an e-mail from a reseller and he sez the markup is for duty and shipping. I'm gonna assume that the smaller the shops, the higher the markup. Plus, this ain't exactly a mass-market piece of kit, so the smaller shops can't be getting many in, hence the markup. The larger shops must be takin' a hit just to sell 'em. Hmmm...looks like I may have to work my Ohio connections to get me hands on one of these without payin' an arm and a leg extra just to get it here. Meanwhile, the reseller fella I was talkin' bout sez he complained about the situation to Wacom in hopes of bringin' the price down. Haven't heard back from Wacom, so I'll be givin' this fella the benefit of the doubt. On account of he wrote back. More as this story develops!

UPDATE on yer UPDATE: Hookay, shot a voicemail to the fellas at Vistek here in T'rawna and Silicon Cowboys out in BC about availability and shipping. As soon as I gets the skinny, I'll let y'all know where the best bang for your Canuck buck is.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey! Thanks for looking into that. Since they come from Japan,(and it's not like the duty is protecting any Canadian tablet device industry) I too always thought it was a bit of a fleece job, but it seems like the prices for Europeans is off the scale. Please post if you hear anything more.
-Paul

Mark Dowsett said...

I was the one that Neil mentioned complained to Wacom about the Canadian prices and will see what they say.

We also run a try-before-you-buy Cintiq program:
http://www.vibecomputing.com/cintiqdemo

Which we feel is necessary for most potential buyers. It's at our own expense as Wacom doesn't offer demo discounts for their resellers.

Vibe does what we can to offer the support that Wacom simply can't offer up here in Canada.

Mark Dowsett said...

Wacom did reply on the pricing issue and we have adjusted our pricing accordingly.

http://vibecomputing.com/wacom/store

We are expecting stock in before the end of this month!

Mark Dowsett said...

We now have stock on the 20wsx and the 12wx's are due in next week.