In line viscosity measurement is like any other process measurement, price must be justified by payback, environmental or safety issues.
Behavioural measurements are the easiest and cheapest to make and the least demanding of technology. You usually have no need for rotational types here unless you need to know about the shear/viscosity relationship of non-newtonian fluids since in many behavioural applications (coating, spraying, atomising of inks, paints, atomising fuels, coating with batter, putting chalk slurries into pipe lines, chemically dosing slurries etc), often all that is needed is a repeatable number. Cambridge, for example make a unit that is claimed to be widely used for inks and paints which are none of them Newtonian. Vibrational technologies are numerous and range from very simple and inexpensive to very high levels of performance.
Dynatrol, Sofraser, Hydramotion, Nametre, VAF and Solartron, all make vibrational technologies.
Analytical measurements are far more demanding because of the temperature viscosity relationship and the need for kinematic viscosity. Unlike behavioural measurements where all you need is the viscosity at the prevailing temperature, Analytical measurements require very high levels of accuracy in order to obtain the viscosity at a reference temperature. For these applications even prices of $100,000 or more are not unusual and frequently have very short payback periods (I know of one such application where the payback was measured in about a month)
Perhaps you have some more detail on your application?
