Oh dear. Nobody stopped me....so I was forced to order an Orion XX14i today
I was looking at the $AU falling, and thought that the XX14i would be about due for another price rise. It was sitting at $2995AU yesterday. I've been talking to Sirius Optics and Astro Optical about the XX14i trying to decide what to do. Sure enough, this morning I received an email from Sirius saying that the price just went up to $3220.
I rang Astro Optical and they were still selling at $2995 (I think it was $2695 before).
It was a hard decision between the meade 16 and the XX14i, but in the end, it boiled down to this for me:
- The meade has a terrible mount that is way oversize, with tiny Alt bearings, made of chipboard that's too thin (current LB owners please don't be upset with me for that comment)
- The meade, at 16", was getting just a bit too big and heavy for me.
- I didn't like the three way truss design of the meade
- I've read too many reports of people having to redesign the mount on the meade / replace it altogether
- The Orion is a perfect fit for my observatory, which currently has a desk / computer and a Meade LX200GPS 10" in it.
- The build quality on the Orion looks to be significantly better than the meade.
- The orion can be handled by one person without any trouble. At 30kg, the tube assembly can be lifted by the truss poles onto the mount without too much issue.
- The orion has 8" alt bearings with tension adjustment, 4 sets of truss poles, integrated weights behind the mirror cell, ebony star formica / teflon combo for the azimuth, is balanced for a 9x50 finder PLUS eyepieces....and so on. The mount is also collapsible in case I want to take it somewhere.
- The orion, at 2" smaller than the meade, was beating it hands down in too many areas. As a former 15" owner, 14" was fine for me and suited my requirements to a tee. 14" still has almost double the light gathering power of my 10" LX200GPS, which is just great for a purely visual scope.
- The orion has an object locator which will be handy for me in suburban skies where star hopping can get a little challenging at times. The beauty of a passive system like this is that I can choose not to use it if I know where I'm going, without losing tracking etc as I would with the LX200GPS.
I read through the entire XX14i manual last night and I was happy with what I read. It'll never be the obsession that I owned years ago, but it will be close enough (especially for the price - 30% of the cost of an obsession 15).
Thanks to everyone for your insights.
Dean