[Wavytone]

Hemi, buried in that lot of Russian test results are some scopes that had test certificates from the manufacturer - notably the maksutovs from Intes and Santel which are sold with a test sheet with the scope serial number, the P-V and RMS test results, and usually a DPAC interferogram. The lab results are similar to those from the manufacturer which suggests to me the lab tests are valid.

The sample is also large enough to do some statistics on well-known products - for example the Celestron SCT's average ⅓ wave P-V while Meade SCTs average ½ wave P-V. There are some really awful dogs as well as a few quite good ones, typical of the statistical variations to be expected from a mass-produced product that has no quantitative cutoff for quality (below which they would be rejected).

George, The astronomy market is a classic example of a market where the vast majority of buyers are ignorant of the qualities of the product that actually matter (vs those that don't), and unable to measure optical quality in quantified terms, with the result being the vast majority of buyers are poorly-informed and choose products based primarily by lowest price.

Rather like the real-estate market in Sydney.

Buyers are hence easily swayed by trivial things that don't really matter such as a pretty paint job. Nice packaging and boxes cost little but can heavily influence sales and customer loyalty (as Apple demonstrated beautifully). Or a new-fangled hi-tech idea (carbon fibre OTA's) that sounds good to the uninitiated, but actually might be worse than a traditional solution.

The reason is that very very few users have the means or the skills to measure the quality of their optics accurately. Manufacturers also are able to avoid offering any sort of guarantee of optical quality for a whole host of reasons - starting with poor collimation.

The result being a market dominated by low-quality products that barely do what is expected but don't excel, and most are not built to last long.

The exceptions to this situation are the "craftsman" manufacturers who make high-quality products in small numbers, and a small number of knowledgable buyers are prepared to buy these, for whom quality comes first - and the price is almost irrelevant.