56 replies to this topic

[Hugh Peck]

  My 10" LX200 died a premature death with a shot capacitor on the main board, and my 12" RCX400 died a very, very premature death with the focus motors going haywire.  In both cases, Meade washed its hands of the results, and I had a couple of expensive boat anchors.

 

Several companies ran ads for years in S&T offering repairs for LX-200 electronics. Hard to sell a bunch when a lot of your customers are complaining about poor quality and worse CS. Of course, Celestron has some real "winner" periods as well, like when Tasco owned them aka the "Tasco Fiasco."

 

Most of the ones I've had have been optical pretty good. Haven't bought a Ningbo-Sunny one so I can't say anything about the current offerings. I usually buy OTAs so that has limited what Meades I've bought to only one new and the rest were used. I'd have bought more if I could have gotten just the OTA. Once you have a couple-three mounts that's enough for a lot of people.

[Stephen Kennedy]

In recent years both Meade and Celestron have probably lost market share to GSO which makes both classic Cassegraines (CC) and Ritchey-Cretien (RC) Cassegraines which I believe compete very strongly against the SCTs.  The CC and RC have OTAs that for the same focal length are comparable to SCTs in size making them just as portable.  In fact, an RC is probably lighter than an SCT of the same size since they do not require a corrector plate.  This is just one of the ways that the RC design is superior to the SCT. 

 

Meade and Celestron SCTs could use easy to fabricate and test spheroidal mirrors once a  process was found to cheaply make corrector plates so few amateur astronomers purchased the extremely expensive RCs that were available.Then, several years ago, GSO discovered a way to make and test the very challenging hyperparaboloidal mirrors needed to produce optically very good RCs and then CCs and sell them at very reasonable prices,

 

When I decided a year ago to purchase a more portable telescope for astrophotography, instead of something like a Celestron C6, I went with a GSO RC6 instead and I am certain I ended up with a far better OTA than the Celestron at a lower cost as well,  The number of people on CN with a GSO RC6 in their signature sign appears to have gone up tremendously in the last year or two, 

[Traveler]

This topic is not about GSO RC's vs Meade and Celestron SCT's. 

[George Methvin]

Good point we don't want to go down that well traveled road. I think my question has been well answered and I thank all of you for your input.

Edited by George Methvin, 15 November 2019 - 08:30 AM.

[carolinaskies]

The reason you see more Celestron equipment isn't because of 'units sold' despite what some pro-celestron/anti-meade members want to present. 

You'll find that Meade's focus in telescopes has been on higher end optics and fork mount equipment like the LX200 & LX600 models without serious competition from Celestron which chose to focus on GEM mounted SCTs.  The LX850 Was a response for a toe-hold in the up-to 14" OTA with the innovative dual-guiding Starlock which is also part of the LX600 line.  Sunny is the regularly recognized name of Chinese ownership while Meade still maintains manufacturing facilities just across the border from California with both American citizen employees as well as non-American employees.  

Both companies have a plethora of sales... people here think Celestron some how has more sales without proof whether within the US or around the world.  With both companies manufacturing base for their wide selection of offerings being manufactured in China it is rather disingenious to present false impressions of quality when both have their fair share of production issues, fauxpaus, and failures.  

The large number of Celestron offerings in the classifieds sections could be reflective of many things, quality, upgrading paths, satisfaction with performance, legacy support, and more.   We could draw a corralary between the classifieds and the manufacture specific forum for Celestron which is also quite active in posts seeking support.   Of late this seems to be around the electronic focuser and issues with the RASA 8 & 11" units and software integration for pointing accuracy.

This hobby is not one that guarantees any constantcy of equipment, equipment performance, equipment obsolescence.  Many long time hobbyists can attest to this statment.   Whether one company has higher or lower sales, what is clear we all have spent our monies to enjoy this hobby.  Attempting to shade evaluation of equipment without operating that equipment for any appreciative time is disingenious as well.  I suggest anyone who is concerned with one particular model or another get some first-hand knowledge of current models before believing negative or defamatory claims.  

Clear Skies.   

[WadeH237]

... people here think Celestron some how has more sales without proof whether within the US or around the world.

And some people think that Meade somehow has sales near Celestron, again without any proof.

 

Without inside information, all we have to go by is what we can see.  We can see that there are currently more offers of used Celestron gear.  We can see that far more amateur astrophotographers are posting images using Celestron scopes (at least on Astrobin, where it's pretty easy to search for this information).  We can see that there is far more discussion of Celestron than Meade in the forums here.  And for what it's worth, I don't think that it's always been this way.  When I started out in amateur astronomy, I saw far more Meade scopes than Celestron in all of the above categories that I listed.  The LX series of fork mounted SCTs was nearly ubiquitous.

 

I agree with you when you say that it is disingenuous to present false impressions of quality.  I, for one, am not making any claims about Meade quality, except to say that the Meade scopes that I have owned performed quite well (except that the focuser on my SN6 was nothing to write home about, but was acceptable at the price point).  I was very satisfied with them.

 

I will allow people to draw their own conclusions about whether Celestron really has sold more units than Meade, or whether people who buy Meade scopes are somehow different in ways that make them invisible in the online communities.

Edited by WadeH237, 15 November 2019 - 08:44 PM.

[Sarkikos]

btw I have never observed the heavens wearing a tie or bow tie...

I have never done anything I like while wearing a tie.

 

Mike

[Eddgie]

The reason you see more Celestron equipment isn't because of 'units sold' despite what some pro-celestron/anti-meade members want to present. 

You'll find that Meade's focus in telescopes has been on higher end optics and fork mount equipment like the LX200 & LX600 models without serious competition from Celestron which chose to focus on GEM mounted SCTs.  The LX850 Was a response for a toe-hold in the up-to 14" OTA with the innovative dual-guiding Starlock which is also part of the LX600 line.  Sunny is the regularly recognized name of Chinese ownership while Meade still maintains manufacturing facilities just across the border from California with both American citizen employees as well as non-American employees.  

Both companies have a plethora of sales... people here think Celestron some how has more sales without proof whether within the US or around the world.  With both companies manufacturing base for their wide selection of offerings being manufactured in China it is rather disingenious to present false impressions of quality when both have their fair share of production issues, fauxpaus, and failures.  

The large number of Celestron offerings in the classifieds sections could be reflective of many things, quality, upgrading paths, satisfaction with performance, legacy support, and more.   We could draw a corralary between the classifieds and the manufacture specific forum for Celestron which is also quite active in posts seeking support.   Of late this seems to be around the electronic focuser and issues with the RASA 8 & 11" units and software integration for pointing accuracy.

This hobby is not one that guarantees any constantcy of equipment, equipment performance, equipment obsolescence.  Many long time hobbyists can attest to this statment.   Whether one company has higher or lower sales, what is clear we all have spent our monies to enjoy this hobby.  Attempting to shade evaluation of equipment without operating that equipment for any appreciative time is disingenious as well.  I suggest anyone who is concerned with one particular model or another get some first-hand knowledge of current models before believing negative or defamatory claims.  

Clear Skies.   

"High End" In price maybe, but I have seen probably 30 interferometer tests of Meade SCTs and the quality is been very random. Some are excellent, some are disasters, and most are somewhere in between.

 

This likely has no bearing on used sales because most take the seller at their word and don't require any kind of any test reports because well, that is hard to get. 

 

 

Money where mouth is:

 

 

Here are four Meade 10" ACF scopes.  Two of these has what most consider to be the pass for diffraction limited (Strehl of .8) and two are below (and even the highest quality one is not what I would call good enough to make the instrument "High End" in total. 

 

. 89.  Not high end optical quality but decent.http://fidgor.ru/Obs...st/test_48.html

 

.81. Close to the bottom limit for diffraction limited optics  http://fidgor.ru/Obs...st/test_50.html

 

.754.  Close, but no banana: http://fidgor.ru/Obs...st/test_50.html

 

.792.  Closer but no banana: http://fidgor.ru/Obs...st/test_50.html

 

Meade with .874 Strehl. Good, but not what I would call "High End" optical quality and if the optics are not high end, then you can make it look pretty, but to be high end, to me, the optics have to be of very high optical quality.

 

http://fidgor.ru/Obs...2/test_470.html

 

 

 

 

 

A clearly defective Meade 12".  This is one of the worst telescope optics I have ever seen in a mass produced SCT with a Strehl of .315

 

http://fidgor.ru/Obs...2/test_459.html

 

Another lemon, this time a 6" Meade:

 

http://fidgor.ru/Obs...2/test_450.html

 

Another Meade with below the bar optics (.749)

 

http://fidgor.ru/Obs...2/test_431.html

 

Under the bar 8"

 

http://fidgor.ru/Obs...2/test_352.html

 

An excellent one!!!!

 

http://fidgor.ru/Obs...2/test_427.html

 

A nice one:

 

http://fidgor.ru/Obs...2/test_417.html

 

Meade 125ETX.  Scope with reputation for excellent optics.  One truly excellent, one that is very decent:

 

http://fidgor.ru/Obs...2/test_412.html

http://fidgor.ru/Obs...2/test_403.html

 

Decent...

 

http://fidgor.ru/Obs...2/test_352.html

http://fidgor.ru/Obs...t/test_220.html

 

And you can badmouth the Russians if you want, but I can pull up similar tests from other websites and they all say the same thing, which is that Meade and Celestron SCT can vary greatly in optical quality.  To me "High End" cannot be associated with high quality because in telescopes, if the optics are not high quality, then it is (in my own opinion) difficult to say that the instrument is a high quality instrument.  Maybe it has high build quality, but that is not what most people think of when you say a telescope is "High Quality."

 

There is the interferometer, and there is everything else.  You can call these tests bad and that is fine with me, but again, I can produce other tests from other sites that say pretty much the same thing. 

 

This has nothing to do with used equipment  sales, but it has everything to do with the difference between truly premium and mass produced optics. 

[Wildetelescope]

btw I have never observed the heavens wearing a tie or bow tie...

Really?  Thought that is how everyone did it !

 

jmd 

[luxo II]

Re inconsistency or otherwise of SCT optics and Russian test lab results, I’ll suggest we’ve done that to death in an older thread.

And FWIW I had extracted the Russian results to a spreadsheet, and done the statistics - and a chart - of the best of the examples for catadioptic scopes 7” and larger.

As for “quality” note carefully that Celestron, Synta and Meade all avoid making any statements about optical quality that could be implied as a guarantee or warranty - such as “diffraction limited”, or “quarter wave” etc. They never offered a quantified measure of quality - so you get whatever comes.

Unlike Intes (which offered 1/6 or 1/8 wave P-V), Santel and a few others.

Edited by luxo II, 27 November 2019 - 01:33 AM.

[TBullet]

I used to volunteer at a local observatory and we were allowed to borrow what ever we wanted. Borrowed a old orange tube c8 and a Meade 8". I found I liked the Celestron scope much better. When I was looking for a Schmidt cass design, I talked to several people and They stated some liked Meades and some like Celestron. I asked the owners of 3 different stores which scopes they sold the most of. Celestron.

 

I'm happy with my CPC 1100, I think it's person preference like Ford is to Chevrolet.

[carolinaskies]

"High End" In price maybe, but I have seen probably 30 interferometer tests of Meade SCTs and the quality is been very random. Some are excellent, some are disasters, and most are somewhere in between.

 

This likely has no bearing on used sales because most take the seller at their word and don't require any kind of any test reports because well, that is hard to get. 

 

 

Money where mouth is:

 

 

Here are four Meade 10" ACF scopes.  Two of these has what most consider to be the pass for diffraction limited (Strehl of .8) and two are below (and even the highest quality one is not what I would call good enough to make the instrument "High End" in total. 

 

. 89.  Not high end optical quality but decent.http://fidgor.ru/Obs...st/test_48.html

 

.81. Close to the bottom limit for diffraction limited optics  http://fidgor.ru/Obs...st/test_50.html

 

.754.  Close, but no banana: http://fidgor.ru/Obs...st/test_50.html

 

.792.  Closer but no banana: http://fidgor.ru/Obs...st/test_50.html

 

Meade with .874 Strehl. Good, but not what I would call "High End" optical quality and if the optics are not high end, then you can make it look pretty, but to be high end, to me, the optics have to be of very high optical quality.

 

http://fidgor.ru/Obs...2/test_470.html

 

 

 

 

 

A clearly defective Meade 12".  This is one of the worst telescope optics I have ever seen in a mass produced SCT with a Strehl of .315

 

http://fidgor.ru/Obs...2/test_459.html

 

Another lemon, this time a 6" Meade:

 

http://fidgor.ru/Obs...2/test_450.html

 

Another Meade with below the bar optics (.749)

 

http://fidgor.ru/Obs...2/test_431.html

 

Under the bar 8"

 

http://fidgor.ru/Obs...2/test_352.html

 

An excellent one!!!!

 

http://fidgor.ru/Obs...2/test_427.html

 

A nice one:

 

http://fidgor.ru/Obs...2/test_417.html

 

Meade 125ETX.  Scope with reputation for excellent optics.  One truly excellent, one that is very decent:

 

http://fidgor.ru/Obs...2/test_412.html

http://fidgor.ru/Obs...2/test_403.html

 

Decent...

 

http://fidgor.ru/Obs...2/test_352.html

http://fidgor.ru/Obs...t/test_220.html

 

And you can badmouth the Russians if you want, but I can pull up similar tests from other websites and they all say the same thing, which is that Meade and Celestron SCT can vary greatly in optical quality.  To me "High End" cannot be associated with high quality because in telescopes, if the optics are not high quality, then it is (in my own opinion) difficult to say that the instrument is a high quality instrument.  Maybe it has high build quality, but that is not what most people think of when you say a telescope is "High Quality."

 

There is the interferometer, and there is everything else.  You can call these tests bad and that is fine with me, but again, I can produce other tests from other sites that say pretty much the same thing. 

 

This has nothing to do with used equipment  sales, but it has everything to do with the difference between truly premium and mass produced optics. 

How many units you want to pull up to represent the many tens of thousands of SCTs produced since the 70s?   

FWIW #459 which you declare so horrible with a strehl of ,315 appears to be acceptable to the owner after they rotated the corrector into proper orientation.  

"A few more hours were required to find the optimal mutual orientation - as a result, a point of quite satisfactory quality was obtained, which the owner has the opportunity to verify on his own:"

Amazing that a bit of tweaking resulted in such a horrible instrument being 'acceptable'.... I'M SHOCKED I tell you SHOCKED!  

[Jon Isaacs]

How many units you want to pull up to represent the many tens of thousands of SCTs produced since the 70s?   

FWIW #459 which you declare so horrible with a strehl of ,315 appears to be acceptable to the owner after they rotated the corrector into proper orientation.  

"A few more hours were required to find the optimal mutual orientation - as a result, a point of quite satisfactory quality was obtained, which the owner has the opportunity to verify on his own:"

Amazing that a bit of tweaking resulted in such a horrible instrument being 'acceptable'.... I'M SHOCKED I tell you SHOCKED!  

 

Was the scope shipped from factory with a Strehl of 0.315?

 

Eddgies point was that Meade and Celestron SCTs  do not represent "high end" optics.

 

Jon

[carolinaskies]

Was the scope shipped from factory with a Strehl of 0.315?

 

Eddgies point was that Meade and Celestron SCTs  do not represent "high end" optics.

 

Jon

I won't accept his point because it's based on a faulty premise that a very small sample size in one shop has anything to do with overall production AND performance.

In REAL WORLD application the difference between a benchmark strehl from a Russia lab has no bearing to in-field use of equipment in the United States.

Further, Strehl numbers DO vary from bench measure in Lab A to bench measure in Lab B when there is no uniform control of variabilities and revarification of test equipment between examples tested and common testing standards showing equivalency.  There are plenty of studies of Strehl reliability which show this very issue could be as much as 80% variability.  

Even within a single Lab bench, units tested weeks, months, or years apart may have varied results because of unscrutinized and undocumented potential changes especially when said Lab is not a professional optics labratory(clear to see in the pictures from the website). Any scientist can easily discredit the data when no controls are known and when the lab equipment condition can be a large variable. 

This is why TRUE high end optics aren't benchmarked in basement labs under less than ideal conditions.  It's also why all equipment is calibrated regularly to a standard measure to ensure results. 

And finally, the data he presents has little if any relevance to the overall discussion of this post on why more Celestrons are seen in classifieds than Meade.   

 

[Jon Isaacs]

I won't accept his point because it's based on a faulty premise that a very small sample size in one shop has anything to do with overall production AND performance.

 

 

You certainly find numerous reasons not to accept these tests.  

 

But you're not answering my question. Was this scope with the measured Strehl of 0.315 shipped this way from the factory. Sure there's variation in between testing labs but in comparison to this.. They're small.  Somebody got a very sorry scope.

 

Personally I think the differences in numbers of used scopes sold is based on the number of scopes in the hands of owners.  Lots of Ford's for sale, not many Ferrari's.

 

Jon

[conus]

btw I have never observed the heavens wearing a tie or bow tie...

 

Yeah, that's a little formal.  I usually just wear a lab coat.

[John Higbee]

A snapshot doesn't have any statistical relevance; keep track over a few months, and then see if the imbalance is the same.

To the extent that it is real, I suspect that Celestron sells far more scopes these days than Meade, especially since Celestron seems to sell a lot of OTA-only scops, while Meade seems to do a lot less of that.

 

As has been pointed out, Meade made too many "mistakes"--poorly/cheaply designed systems that died (or worked poorly out of the box), and then abandoned them.  My 10" LX200 died a premature death with a shot capacitor on the main board, and my 12" RCX400 died a very, very premature death with the focus motors going haywire.  In both cases, Meade washed its hands of the results, and I had a couple of expensive boat anchors.

 

And it really is a pity, since, when they worked, they were just spectacular performers, with good optics and dead-on goto (that was simplicity itself to  perform a 2-star alignment for).

But I'll never again buy a Meade product that has electronics in it, and I suspect that I'm not alone in that determination.

Completely agree with your last statement.  Bought a ETX 125 PE for its superb optics and its improved GOTO mount.  The optics are superb...the mount' s GOTO function was a bust, despite multiple repair attempts.  Just my experience...YMMV.  John

[dapalmer]

You certainly find numerous reasons not to accept these tests.  

 

But you're not answering my question. Was this scope with the measured Strehl of 0.315 shipped this way from the factory. Sure there's variation in between testing labs but in comparison to this.. They're small.  Somebody got a very sorry scope.

 

Personally I think the differences in numbers of used scopes sold is based on the number of scopes in the hands of owners.  Lots of Ford's for sale, not many Ferrari's.

 

Jon

He did answer you. He said that the claimed Strehl of 0.315 is not a trustworthy claim in his opinion. So we do not know if it was shipped from the factory with that value or not. He also stated as much as an 80% variance in testing has been seen. It is neither confirmed nor denied. He also noted that the owner ended with satisfactory results, which was not mentioned in the post he was refuting.

 

Whether his response is correct or not is something I cannot answer, but he did respond to your question. 

Edited by dapalmer, 17 December 2019 - 10:38 AM.

[luxo II]

I’ll suggest the real answer is the mundane one - Celestrons outsold Meades by 10:1.

[carolinaskies]

I’ll suggest the real answer is the mundane one - Celestrons outsold Meades by 10:1.

Putting this comment where it belongs.. in the string theory that anything is possible despite it's own impossibility in our own universe. 

[Bill Barlow]

Maybe the Meade’s had better optics than the Celestron’s, which is what I have personally observed in owning several of each from 6” to 14”.

 

Bill

Edited by Bill Barlow, 20 December 2019 - 10:23 AM.

[Hesiod]

At least in Italy Celestron (by several years) have a better commercial network.

All of the most trustworthy shops have the full line of Celestron's SCTs readily available (or available in a very reasonable amount of time), while few of them deal in Meade's.

This is why I ended up with a Celestron instead of a Meade...and guess that happened to many, as even here second-hand SCTs (OTA) are for the most from Celestron.

[carolinaskies]

Hmm... haven't seen any new fork mounted SCT 14" Celestrons or 16" Celestrons....

Nor have I seen any Celestron 10-16" Newtonians out there.  

Twenty years ago there were two main big companies... Meade and Celestron.  

Today there are multiple companies with equipment, albeit most coming from Chinese factories, though the designs aren't Chinese. 

You won't find Chinese comparables to top line Meade or Celestron because it's too costly to manufacture back door.  

Depending on where you live on this planet the cost of one brand or another can be a major deciding factor which brand you buy.  If import costs are too high in your country you might see more Meade or more Celestron.  If there isn't a great many in country vendors your local support/selection can be limited to the bias of that vendor for in-country in person purchase. 

Even here in the US we have vendors who don't carry certain brands due to personal bias.  But they are a minority.  When I bought my first new scopes more than 20 years ago that company stocked more Meade than Celestron, because they were more popular, but they could order you anything you wanted. 

Today I don't care which company made my equipment as long as it does that I want it to.  Meade, Celestron, Orion, iOptron... it really doesn't matter.

 

[WadeH237]

You won't find Chinese comparables to top line Meade or Celestron because it's too costly to manufacture back door.  

Huh?

 

Can you give some examples?

[carolinaskies]

Huh?

 

Can you give some examples?

Specifically the mounts and the 8" and larger SCTs... There's no equivalents offered otherwise we'd see all kinds of branded fork mounts.   Nor do we see CGEM CGX knock-offs, RASA knock-offs.   The last time we had anything close were the Dynamax B&Ls many years ago.   The Chinese aren't going to spend their money for low volume telescopes.  

You can however buy all kinds of refractors and Maks.