> Why are they so > expensive?
Feeders are expensive, you can easily have considerably more invested in feeders than the placement machine. On new machines you won't find feeders coming in at much less than $500/each, often considerably more. As a rule the more recent the design, the faster and more accurate a feeder is, the feeder has to keep up with technology after all. Mechanical/pneumatic feeders have a fixed pitch, often electronic feeder will have a programmable one, this helps if you are placing 0402 for exaample, as it can index forwards one part instead of two. I can't speak for Universal ones and its varies from machine to machine.
Pneumatic Yamaha run $50 new from > china.
No they don't, they would be FAKE Chinese copies, being and old design, popular and entirely mechanical that makes them easy and worthwhile to copy.
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