Compared to
many of the others available at the time, it seemed to me to be:
1. expensive
Keep in mind that this is largely irrelevant. Terminals were often
used as bargaining chips when large systems were purchased. Salesmen
could "throw in" some number of terminals with a system, in order to
make a sale. If a business was being hard-nosed about the sale of
potential large VAX system, the salesmen could perhaps "sweeten" the
deal with ten or twenty bonus VT100s, free. All the profit was in the
CPUs, or more importantly, in the disk and tape farms (or to be really
fair about this, the service).
Along that line, here is a page from a DEC sales catalog offering VT52's with
"It's cheaper by the 4-pack":