Metal Detecting Tennis

Anyone keeping their eye on the main metal detecting manufacturers will know that the entry level end of the hobby is being saturated with new detectors. The pushing and pulling is coming from Minelab and Nokta, Nokta pretty much sealed the deal in the entry level market with the inception of the Simplex. Minelab clearly went after it with the introduction of their Xterra Pro, around the time of its release Nokta announced the introduction of a new line which included three new Simplex machines. A few months back Nokta then announced two new multi-frequency units called the Score and Double Score, these are both being sold at what I would call entry level prices. I believe Nokta are gunning for the Minelab Vanquish series with these specific detectors. Looking at the prices it makes me wonder just how much it actually costs to manufacture these new wave of machines, I'm thinking very little.

Let's give credit where it's due, all the machines mentioned above for the price are fantastic, they're literally lightyears ahead of all the beginner machines that were available when I first started detecting. Things have moved forward a lot but I personally think we hit a wall a while back. It actually looks like Minelab have regressed in what they're offering with the release of the Xterra Voyager. It looks like some cheap Chinese machine that they've literally just stuck their name on. I'm starting to question what Minelab are all about these days, there seems to be something odd going on in regards to the quality of what they're now producing, and the thought process behind their releases seems confused. If they continue to put out cheap mediocre detectors I can see them running into troubles. Let us not forget what happened to Easter Island, OK so Minelab probably won't turn to cannibalism, but large organisations can have a very fragile core.

When I look at all these machines I can't help but wonder if we're literally being presented with pretty much the same metal detector over and over again. Cosmetically they might look different and have a different company name on them but is there really a big enough difference between them all when it comes to raw performance. If I'm going to be honest I genuinely don't think there is. Depth limits have pretty much been reached on a digital platform and the unmasking and separation literally has nothing in it. From all the demos I've watched each detector seems to perform at similar levels in this regard.

From a business perspective there has to be give and take, what I mean by this is, Nokta can't release a new cheaper multi-frequency machine that's going to equal the Legend otherwise they're shooting themselves in the foot. Clearly they have to stunt their performance in certain areas otherwise people are going to start to wonder what they're actually getting that's better in the machines at a higher price point. To help brush over this issue, releasing units with fewer settings works well because limited performance can be justified by limited settings. I also understand that the machines with no settings allow people to easily get into the hobby and if they enjoy it then they can move on to a detector that's a little more versatile. 

I believe if you're the type of person to purchase a couple of the machines mentioned above thinking that there's going to be a huge performance difference, you could be left disappointed, in the end I think it comes down to the brand that you're a fan of the most. It's all pretty much a level playing field. I do have to ask myself where all this is heading, flooding the market with basic cheap machines could come back and bite both Minelab and Nokta pretty hard if they're not business savvy in the future.  Look what happened to Fisher/First Texas they dug their own hole by producing underwhelming entry level machines with little to no variation.