[dekhn]

Some things change, but to make NMR cost effective would be cheating mother nature. The entire technique is based on producing a strong and homogenous magnetic field that can hold a lot of sample, only to probe the sample with weak RF and listen to its faint echoes.

Industrial diamonds got "cheap" but large ones never did.

[kragen]

You could be right; certainly you know a great deal more about the subject than I do.

What are the companies, or at least the industries, that would buy all the machines if you could make them much cheaper and/or better?

[dekhn]

any purveyor of fine chemicals (polymers, etc) and petroleum processing company (hydrocarbon analysis).

[kragen]

Thank you very much!