I just checked and I get $434.46 USD plus $82 USD shipping for 3 read heads (1um) and 2m magnetic tape.
I may as well pick up enough for my own chipmaster lathe too... but Ditron is less expensive. Still not cheap though. They have free shipping. Lets see if they have loyalty pricing
When you start discussion with Ditron and customize your order (lengths, types of scales etc.) they start talking $USD and add shipping cost but they also drop the prices to compensate for the shipping cost. The free shipping offer is just the starting point from their Aliex site.
When I started this, Aikron looked like the best pricing but once I got on chat with Ditron, Aikron was not competitive and I even gave Aikron the opportunity to talk turkey and they stuck to list price. I do like the Aikron tech data presentation much better which made me favor them in the beginning.
The other thing I found was, except where space is a driver, glass scales, even small profile are less costly. I wound up with the mag tape in my Myford cross slide and a mag scale for my mill quill (First LC1-1/2 BP clone maybe using leftover tape). The rest were slim or regular glass which I guess would be more reliable long term than magnetic. I'm basing this on the glass scales being enclosed and the potential for adhesive and mag tape to decay with time or exposure to cutting fluids etc. All my scales are 1u resolution no extra cost.
I'm working on write-ups on my lathe & mill so I hope to cover more of this discussion there.
One last point, have a look at TouchDRO for the display, the scales can come from anywhere. I'm doing a write-up now on my lathe and I go into my selection process but for the mill especially I really like the graphic display of TouchDRO. I think you also mentioned 200 user definable datum points for the Ditron 80, TDRO has unlimited data points with all the other STD DRO functions including tool offset settings. You can segregate sets of user defined points in defined work spaces and save them for later re-use. If you have a lot of defined points in a small area you can effectively "layer" them to unclutter the display.
I've not had more than an afternoon's play with it yet but a) if I wasn't already, I'm SOLD on DRO for a mill especially and also for a lathe and b) I really like the ability to navigate to the user defined data points when milling. The DRO has a "magnetic" function which automatically moves the "focus" to the nearest point and gives you a readout of the distance to the point. You see the point change color on the graphic display also. You can also define things like multiple "guard" lines and receive a warning if you come too close, good for reminders about where you are on the part.
Anyhow I had better get on with my DRO writeup!
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