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[Tom T]

...and want your help.

While we are keeping exactly where we are going under wraps for now (look for more announcements down the road), one of the things on our long range plan is to provide in-depth quantitative reviews of equipment. To this end we are currently devising rubric's (guidelines) to be used in equipment evaluation so multiple reviews can grade an item on similar scales and we can get a better overall idea of how the item performs.

We thought we would start by devising the rubric for mount testing.

To this end, we'd like to know what you see as important questions for our reviews to ask/answer when they are evaluating mounts.

Items we will be looking at (and encourage you to look at) as examples:
1) Current mount reviews on CN - what benchmarks are currently used?
2) Sky & Tel mount or other magazine reviews - how did they do it - what do they look at?

Here is an example of a checklist item to help get you started:

1) Stability under an XXlb load. With the legs fully extended: Tap the ota lightly and time (with a stop watch) how long it takes the shakes to damp out. Next tap the tripod leg lightly and time how long it takes the shakes to damp out. Retract legs and test again.

We'd appreciate all input - please remember we are working on the mount rubric at this point, and will be working on others in the future. Remember, we are trying to make the guidelines as quantitative as possible so multiple reviewers can evaluate the products with as little as possible subjectivity.

I'll also posting this in the equipment forum, please restrict your answers to that forum.

Thank you!

Tom T.