[Wavytone]

Once upon a time I enquired about the rate at which C8 and Meade 8's were sold. It is a surprisingly large number, just in Sydney.

Meade and Celestron went after the mass market with a design aiming to be jack-of-all-trades - but not particularly good at anything, and applying manufacturing management principles from the 1920s to keep costs down - ship a product just barely good enough to keep most beginners happy, occasionally defective, but never outstanding.

The strategy works - most customers probably use the scope a half dozen times then find it's all too hard, and it spends the next 20 years stored under the hose or in a garage until its sold after a cleanup.

But look more critically and you will find these scopes are not optimal as lunar & planetary visual scopes thanks to a gross secondary obstruction, focal ratio that is too short (f15 would have been a lot better) and sub-par optics that are not really tested or matched (as revealed by the russian test results), yet too slow to be much good for photography (they should have done an f/7 astrograph). It has been this way for the past 40 years BTW.

Post 1995 the reliability of the fork mounts and electronic from both have been so poor most owners have de-forked them and put the OTA on a mount made by someone else (mainly Skywatcher, Losmandy or iOptron).

But most customers don't know the difference anyway between what they have and "perfect" optics, nor have to tools to precisely measure the optical quality of their scope to know whether it is quarter-wave, or not (most SCTs aren't, by the way).

The other trick they have is this - keep a few good ones at the factory in case a smarter customer DOES know the difference and returns a scope as defective, so you can ship him a known good one. The wacky part about this is the customer will probably tell all on CloudyNights that the company saved the day, and more kudos to them.

Back in the 1960's I would guess Celestron made optics with little more than backyard grinding and polishing machines and hand-finished, with the correctors made the same way Schmidt did in the 1950s. Yet despite the widespread use of CNC machines and precision machining, Celestron never have attempted to:

a) modify the OTA focusser design to fix the primary mirror slop issue, despite other manufacturers showing it can be done;
b) build a decent mount better than beginner level;
c) build a mount that can survive long term frequent usage (observatories), or
d) improve the average production quality of the optics in as-shipped scopes.