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Hi Julian,
I bought my VC 200L (now sold) going back when they first came on the market. At the time they were very different from the typical SCT's, the features that made them different were a good selling point.ie. no corrector plate to dew up, flat field right out to the edges, no mirror 'flop'. It was my next step up from starting out with a Konus 114mm Newtonian, which I incidently loved and used every night for around 2 years when I first started visually observing.
As I became well orientated with the VC, I found visually it was good, (with Takahashi occulars) however I never had a side by side comaprison with a SCT or reflector of the same size. If I had the chance to look through an apo refractor of say 100mm at the time, maybe I would have gone that way.
Any way being 8 hours away from a city, a man out here has to be self sufficient so a scope that is relatively easy to maintain is a must. The VC I found very hard to get exact collimation, and I did a colimation every year for 11 years! As said, it's fine for visual and adequit for starting out into imaging, but once my tastes matured, even after laser aligning the focuser/ corrector to secondary and then star tests to align the primary, my images always appeard soft. With the very clear skies I have here, this was dissapointing. Also flex in the tube (very thin metal tube) became an issue, especially when imaging at its native focal length, doing long exposures and with a small chip, things are critical, the slightest movement any where will show up as elongated stars. This elongation I found was exasperated when ever my auto guider made a correction.. (a small jerk back would flex the tube every so slightly) I tried many things over the years to improve these things, had a measurable improvement, but still these issues plagued me and weren't going to get me further along....
So Julian, you must decide where you are at and what you want the scope for.
For some one who wants a bigger aperture and are moving up from something smaller to better gear, this scope will be a good interim on the way to getting there.
If this is not you then I'd be looking for something optically better.
Hope this helps.
BTW, thanks for the kind comments on my images!!
Cheers
Rich
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