All is not lost for European AV Science members seeking a good grey screen at a knock out price. If Stewart wishes to maintain its elite pricing policy for European customers, who are used to being milked to the bone, its their party. However, they will be reducing their client base proportionally. See Gordon's post here:
http://www.wvip.co.uk/ubb/Forum8/HTML/000250.html
There is also another issue which I am sure is of great concern to all AV Science members: Alan and David's forum has all but created the demand for this product, with members involved in Beta tests and the forums' moderators and administrators generating much of the creative momentum for this product's launch. Now AV Science is going to be refused the right to sell to its own members whose demand for this product was created solely by their efforts. I sure hope Stewart has plans for seriously making up for such an unjust treatment of its most credible and highly revered reseller worldwide. Forum members located overseas are also thus precluded from being one stop/one shop customers of AV Science, buying a G15 and a grey screen all in one package. Nice going!
AV Science had a customer friendly forum offering for its members of a further discount on already very competitive prices, and this for all its forum members without discrimination of race, religion, creed, or neighborhood. Some forum members who know Don Stewart personally attest to his fine personal qualities. But such commercial policies reflect a vision where some people live on the wrong side of the tracks, with segregationist discriminatory sales practices substituting for business acumen. Pointing out that some strategies can be so short term, that they were already obsolete yesterday. Each and everyone has the right to set his own timeframe, however anachronic, and geographic horizons, even when the Atlas has removed commercial boundaries in the wake of free trade and real-time communication.
European forum members, and previously potential customers for Stewart products, may be inclined to respond in accordance and be encouraged by this bias to their detriment to transfer their patronage their competitors. And until competing commercial greyscreen products are readily available through AV Science or elsewhere, they may turn in the meanwhile to the custom greyscreen threads in the AV Science forum, to gain insight on the topic, and find assitance and supplies to paint their own. While entailing a little more trouble, it may well produce superior results to those of the Stewart product, and will provide a double satisfaction: that of having made it oneself, learning in the process, and that of refusing the roll of European Milkcow for arbitrary geographic distribution of corporate profitability.
For those who are interested, you can find posts in the Screen forum. Grey screens can be custom made by yourself or by subcontracting other forum members. (anyone in mind?)
http://www.avsforum.com/ubb/wink.gif One can also find ways to mix one's own blend or purchase cans of methodically prepared ready to apply greyscreen paint surface coating.
However, as European members are precluded by Stewart from chanelling their funds through AV Science for this product, maybe AV Science could provide its European client base with alternative product offerings from other manufacturers willing to design similar products with the forum's participation, but with the clearly announced commitment that existing AV Science customers and contributing forum members will NOT be excluded from their purchase. Once Don Stewart retires to Switzerland, lets not all forget to refuse to sell to him on the basis of his geographical location, and cheerfully send him off to his mountain village hardware store to see what he can find!
Hope that such shortsightedness leads to competing product offerings - free competition being what once made America great, and the absence of that notion making, as today, some Americans look pretty small indeed.
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Brett
