Telescope Reviews: The future of the Meade company...

So as many people have known, meade is going through some very hard times over the past year and change.

There have been some huge problems in the areas of customer support, quality assurance, and repair services.

There is an article from sky and telescope which further details the issues:

http://www.skyandtelescope.com/news/10819876.html

Not only are they cutting costs left and right, but they're no longer going to be manufacturing inside the US at their california location. Instead they are moving to either mexico/china for a cheaper production line. Also, as the article says, meade is going to temporarily discontinue several of their popular series, and permanently stopping production of a few other less popular models.

There have been widespread problems with the LX-90 ACF models which have been plagued by original defects in the goto mechanisms. To make matters even worse, there is a long documentation of a horrid repair cycle that seemed to go very badly for a number of customers.

The entire issue is well documented by weasner at his famous LX/ETX website...

http://www.weasner.com/lx90/index.html

To this date, these are the only issues that i am aware of. To say the least, these are still quite troubling to someone like myself who has never had anything but great experiences with meade.

I own a meade lx90 EMC, which is the model that came before the lx90 ACF, and directly before the LX90 UHTC.

To this day since 2002-2003 when i first received the telescope, I have never had a single issue that is not deemed a normal wear and tear result.

I have NEVER updated my autostar firmware, not even once, and it still runs near flawless to this very day.

Something tells me that between 2002-2007 something had to happen inside the company to commence such dramatic changes.

Everything in my telescope is still top notch, and i have never cleaned the telescope optics even once. The most i have ever done was a light air dusting done by a air puff similar to an ear syringe.

And yet, people get new lx90 ACF telescopes, which are defective brand new right out of the box.

I am going to play it safe and stay away from all meade products until this little bump in the road gets sorted out.

When I have a product that was made years ago outperform a brand new, "newer" design telescope of the same general construction, it makes me worry about the other products put out by the same company.

Reading telescope reviews over the past several years, almost all reviewers gave the winning vote to the meade telescope against competitors like celestron and orion. Almost always, the meade telescope performed just a little little bit better than all the others, and thats why people respected them.

I am really disappointed in meade. To this day, meade is the only telescope/optics manufacturer to make enough revenue to be a publicly traded company. How can the biggest, most successful, most well known/popular, amateur telescope maker take such a huge plunge in customer support, quality assurance, and repair services?

What do you guys think?

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Meade 8.25"(209.55mm) LX-90 EMC (SCT)

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