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Johnno,
You have obviously never "WASTED" your hard earned cash on a crap product recommended by someone that didn't know the difference between crap and quality and said the crap product was FANTASTIC. I have and learnt the hard way, through my pocket.
Cloudy Nights has an extensive world wide reading audience and historically there have been issues with Cloudy Nights reviews where people have posted product reviews that were clearly innaccurate and this is the reason "Cloudy Nights" now break their product reviews into 2 categories, "Cloudy Nights Reviews" and "User Reviews", to assist potential end users sorting the wheat from the chaff. These innaccurate user reviews caused a large amount of dissent amongst Cloudy Night members because of the number of people that wasted their hard earned and this was when they split them. You probably were not involved in the hobby when this occured and weren't aware of it. I made the comment to indicate to Steve that the review was one endorsed by cloudy nights and hence likely to be accurate.
The internet has been a great place for people to improve their technical knowledge of astronomy and astronomical products immensely but it has also led to a lot of innaccurate and incorrect information being made available, as people freely pass on the innaccurate tidbits they pick up which tends to have a mushroom effect across the reading public. All you need is one person to say something incorrect and very soon you have 10 people then 100 people regurgitating the same garbage.
My greatest bugbear ?? is when people continually post comments about products and rate $100 products as Fantastic, Incredible, Superb, Outstanding when they have never used the $1,000 equivalent of the same product to know what Fantastic, Incredible, Superb or Outstanding really are. There is a major difference between a budget product being a fair performer and representing good value for money to being outstanding. Classic example. I would like a $1 for every time I have read how good the 2" 30mm BW Optics 80 deg eyepiece is (Also sold by Andrews). The eyepiece represents good value for money for people on a limited budget. In reality, compared to the 31mm Nagler T5, 26mm Nagler T5, 30mm Pentax XW, 35mm Panoptic, 27mm Panoptic its junk, yet the words superb, outstanding and fantastic flow freely when describing its performance, invariably posted by people that are using a 2" wide angle eyepiece for the 1st time or have never used one of the premium 2" eyepieces.
CS-John B
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