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I think primarily when you are going for your first glimpses of the sky nothing will kill it faster than an unstable mount.
Friends living close by had wanted a telescope for their kids to see some `stuff' and they'd allready had a 4" Tasco and been able to find nothing.
I picked them up a GSO 8" Dob here on IIS for $200 and I can report that a few years down the track it is still all in good working order and 4 kids under 10 years of age haven't been able to destroy it so I am not as pessimistic as Wavytone .
A 6" Dob will be easy to use and far more stable than anything you can buy in any category under $500. Cheap small refractor will have no image scale and shaky image will put a newbie off pretty quickly unless they've got a lot of patience . ( MY first telescope was a 66mm 30x spyglass hanging from the Hills Hoist with the eyepiece end resting on cardboard boxes , but then I had time on my hands !)
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