I’m from the UK and just had a quote for a CCD. The unit price I have been quoted is for a bulk order is $1,000 for model A or $1,800 for model B
So to my British eyes this looks like One Thousand Dollars and One Thousand Eight Hundred Dollars. Which seems very expensive, so do Americans often use the comma where I would use a point ? Could this be One Dollar and One Dollar Eighty ?
1,000 = one thousand.
1,800 = one thousand, eight hundred.
Absolutely NOT. Americans NEVER use a comma to separate numbers from decimals.
And if one made a decimal point sloppy, so that it appeared to be a comma, he would not have included that last zero.
Thanks for the quick response. I doubt I will be buying from those guys.
…unless they think we Brits write our numbers like that. Which we absolutely would NOT do. EVER 
What do you mean by CCD? And how many would be in the order?
A range of 1:1000 in price is reasonable for this product?
In other words you might consider it at $1,000 if you were expecting to pay $1.00?
Its a Charge Coupled Device, basically a camera. Like those found in copiers/scanners, barcode scanners and digital cameras.
The order is 1000+ units.
Without knowing more about the specs of the CCDs in question, yes. Ones that are churned out by the million would be inexpensive, but special-purpose ones would be pricey, and a custom job would be very expensive. A CCD is basically a chip, and setup and design costs for chips are quite high.
We are developing a new product, and this is first round of costing. So it is a bit of an unknown for us. We wouldn’t consider paying $1000, as the resolution we require is similar to a copier/scanner, and we are just looking for a standard off the shelf CCD which is mass manufactured.
Perhaps the numbers you’ve mentioned are the price for the whole order, rather than per unit?
We Americans are not entirely consistent about using commas to separate thousands or millions. The longer the number, though, the more likely commas will be used, so that the eye can more easily discern the amount. So you might see “one thousand dollars” expressed as either $1000 or $1,000 or even $1,000.00, but “one million dollars” will almost always be $1,000,000 rather than $1000000. (And you might even see it as $1m).
I wasn’t asking you, Sunspace.
I’m an electronics design engineer - I order parts all the time. I’ve never run into a situation in 30 years where my estimate of a price would be off by three orders of magnitude.
Ah.
Reasonable misunderstanding, especially if the OEM in question has staff with English as a second language.
“At the 1000 unit price point, 1000 units cost $1800.”