[allan gould]

Well I was pleasantly surprised . I ordered the new alt/az mount from ioptron in china. On Friday the money cleared to their bank and at 3:00pm the mount and tripod arrived Monday morning. Now thats service for you.
It was double boxed and everything was in place. No damage whatsoever.
Eager to see what it would do I inserted 8 AA batteries in the mount, switched it on and it came up with the opening screen. Filled in location etc and then did an alignment. No stars as it was clouded over as usual so I just accepted where ever it was pointing.
Then set up several landmarks and asked the mount to go to them and it was spot on every time. There appeared to be no problems at all with the reproducability of the goto, just couldn't do it with the stars.
The goto is done at max speed (1200x) which gives the typical coffee grinder noise but the other speeds, 2x, 8x, 64x, 256x are all quiet and appear without jerkyness. The play in the mount which had been mentioned was not present in my mount. Don't know how typical this is. Even at high mag focussing was easy and no problem.
I tried 4 scopes on the mount. A 90mm MAK, a 102mm widefield refractor, a 80mm WO Megrez and an 8" SCT.
I tried the latter as it was claimed to be able to use this scope on the mount - forget it. It did take the weight but would overload it in time. A 6" SCT would be do-able.
Only the alt axis has a slippage pad, the Az is geared therefore you cant just point the scope to where you want but must use the motors.
I'm running on 8 AA batteries but will try a portable battery and some other things when the skies clear.
So far I,m more than happy. I was going to use my Manfrotto tripod with this but it has an 8M thread in the base of the cube and so I was forced to use the tripod it came with. It isnt absolutely immovable but with care is quite servicable.
In short I'm happier and found my unit far better than the other reviewer noted. Perhaps better quality control.
I got 91c/US$ exchange rate and so I'm laughing as it cost $200 for the unit and $69 postage. So I hav a Alt/Az mount with goto for about $300 - not bad.
I'm going through the handset parameters at the moment and its very easy to use but I need to figure out mow many DSOs it carries and how many user objects.
I'll give another review with more usage on the stars.