I agree completely. For larger equipment of a specialist nature one can understand the economics of the cost of manufacture being higher, but when it comes to off the shelf items it does seem a bit like they are just making money at the expense of disabled people. For example, when I could still see enough to use a CCTV for reading, the unit, a black and white rostrum camera looking at a mirror with an x/y table and a 21 inch monitor cost over 1000 quid, but since access to work paid for it, then the government footed the bill. When the two fluorescent lights failed, an engineer looked inside and found the electronic ballast which drove them had died. It was a normal item, branded at the time Philips. Asking Tiemen, who made the unit for a replacement was according to them going to cost 120 quid. Go down to the local electrical wholesalers, and the exact same item costs 14 quid. Now its not going to cost all that extra to get it from the Netherlands to here, which is where Tiemen were located is it?
This sort of thing happens an awful lot.. Indeed inside that unit in order to stop people just buying the rostrum camera unit they had not reversed the line scan on the camera electronics, instead had reversed the connections to the scan coils on the monitor, meaning that the monitor could not be used as a monitor elsewhere and the camera unit would not work with a tv's video input, as either would result in mirror image pictures. Brian