Getting us back to budget night vision (as opposed to thermal and binos and cans and the like), I really wish Gen 2 night vision devices had come down to reasonable prices, but that never really happened. That's rather insane, really, considering Gen 2 image intensification technology has been around since, what, the mid-70's?? That was .... wait for it ... 45ish years ago.
So let's get some context as to what 45ish years SHOULD do to technology and prices. In 1977, Tandy Corp.'s TRS-80 was launched at a price of $600 (equivalent to $2500 in 2020). It came with a 1.77Mhz 8-bit 8088 processsor, 4k DRAM, a casette tape drive, and a 12" (64 X 16) monochrome monitor. It was, at the time, the best of breed personal computer at its price point, with the Apple II costing more than twice what the Tandy did ... while having SLOWER/worse specs.
These days, the average $20 child's toy with a chip of some sort in it has more computing power and storage on board ... and a $24 burner Android phone has many times the computing power of all of the redundant systems of all of the US space shuttles of the 1970's and 1980's ... combined.
So ... that's the power/potential/capability increase and cost reduction we should reasonably expect for things of a technological nature across 45ish years, right? Enter the AN/PVS-4 of the 1970's. Contracted in 1976 and deployed in 1978, the very first and most expensive of them that were acquired by the DoD (in the fiscal year 1976, interestingly) cost $4,051.57 (equivalent to $18,429 in 2020) each -- per a DoD appropriations document I dug up stating that 543 were acquired in fiscal year 1976 toward an overall inventory objective of 1669 at a cost of $2.2M. (Fascinating. Here's the
source, if interested in cross-checking...)
So, umm, Gen 2 tubes certainly got better, sure. But they didn't get THAT much better across 45 years when we compare to other tech improvements. I get it, tube tech hasn't changed much since inception, we've made incremental improvements, only. But the cost is the kicker ... it's stayed high despite our production techniques improving and, thus, production costs theoretically going down.
I'M baffled why Gen 2 tubes aren't $300-$400. We've been making tubes for so long now we've got to be pretty friggen efficient at it, technologically speaking. And the PVS-14 housing's been around for ages, so at this phase it's readily mass-produced. My only thought is that the prices remain artificially high because the tube manufacturers have limited production capacity and simply can't or won't mass produce because spooling up new facilities to make tubes is spendy and they're milking the life out the investments in the facilities they already have...
