7.What other kind of lease might I consider?
An operating lease, if you can find a leasing company willing to pro-
vide one on a femtosecond laser, would make a difference. It comes
down to a judgment call as to what you think is preferable. With an
operating lease, you'll pay less per month, because at the end of the
lease, ownership goes back to the leasing company.
But is that a good thing? It may come down to whether you think
the technology will be obsolete after, say, the end of a 3-year lease, or
whether you think you'll be able to buy it outright in 3 years and then
keep using the machine for a few more years without having to make
a monthly payment. It's similar to a car lease. The downside is that if
you keep trading your vehicle in at the end of every lease, you keep
making monthly payments forever. But the upside is that you're
always driving a pretty nice, relatively new car.
For now, however, femtosecond technology is so new that there
may not be an aftermarket for femto lasers, so a leasing company
might be puzzled as to how to underwrite an operating lease.
Eventually, however, this should be an option.
8.What should we expect in terms
of durability and improving technology?
We really have little or no idea how long we should expect these
machines to last. But we do know that, for example, excimer lasers
don't wear out in 3 years and that laser equipment in general doesn't
have a lot of mechanical components that can wear out. The laser
head can wear out — we see that in other types of lasers — but not
the whole device. The real question is whether game-changing tech-
nology will come about, and whether there will be game-changing per-
formance improvements. I happen to think it's likely that if so, it will
be the result of a software upgrade, and that any other improvements
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O U T PAT I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E O N L I N E | January 2015
