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I doubt the gears are plastic. I have had my NJP mount end up guiding to the stops of the mount and nothing broke. The worm and gears on the motor are metal, as you can see them. Internally in the motor I can't say. But my understanding was the motors that drive the mount are hand wound by Tak themselves and are not an off the shelf item. They spin at 19000 rpm and that is why they have that great jet engine whinning sound that I like )obviously not a loud sound!). I will post the question on the Tak Uncensored site and see what the reply is.
I have had a Mountain Instruments MI250 (very similar to a G11 but a step up), a Vixen Sphinx (junk), Tak NJP and Paramount ME. Naturally the Paramount is the best (and by far the most expensive). It is the best by a decent margin as well. The NJP is the next best (I still have it and use it). The MI250 was also good and used the Gemini system.
The main plus of the Tak mount in my opinion is it is very well built mechanically, extremely easy to use and there is a very nice Temma Driver done by Chuck Faranda for use with Ascom (both are free) that enables you to park the mount, control the guiding parameters more closely etc.
The Tak mount synchs and is accurate as has been pointed out very very quickly - this is amazing. A couple of synchs and bang your go-tos are somewhat accurate. Good enough to find a target at 1200mm focal length. Not good enough probably at 3 metres though.
You could improve that by using Software Bisque's T-Point which models your mouints performance and will tell you how far off your polar alignment is and how much you need to adjust the knobs to get it more accurate.
The NJP was replaced by the EM400 and my understanding is it is a beefier version and can handle more payload.
I have at times though struggled to get perfectly round stars with my NJP. The Paramount works at a much higher level of accuracy enabling it to achieve almost perfectly round stars at long focal length. But again this comes at a price (Paramount ME is about US$14,500 new plus shipping and GST etc etc).
So really you are comparing Tak EM200/400 to G11 right?
There are lots of G11 users on this site and they can advise better. It is my understanding though that an out of the box G11 is no match for an EM400. The G11 would have to be upgraded to match the Tak with Ovision worm and perhaps other things. My use of Gemini was it took a lot longer to setup the mount and get go-tos working than the simple Tak setup. But it would probably favour a permanent setup. If you are setting up each night the Tak would be infinitely more user friendly. Gemini is a clever system but takes a while to learn. It has some interesting features - the Polar align action is clever but TPoint is probably superior and you can use Tpoint on any mount.
The main weakness of Tak is no PEC available on their mounts. They rely on their mechanical accuracy in the first place. Having just started using PEC for the first time with a Paramount ME I would have to say that is a big minus for Tak. That means the best you will get out of your Tak will be about 4 arc seconds PE unless you have an exceptional version. Tak claims 7 arc seconds is the standard for their mounts (that is lowish compared to lower end mounts that have 20 or 30 arc seconds).
PEC on a decent mount can reduce PE to 1 arc second or less with the right gear (AP or Paramount and others).
Another big competitor to Tak and perhaps a bit more expensive are AstroPhysics mounts. The AP900 is a competitor to the EM400. I would probably choose an AP900 over a Tak EM400 now as it has PEC available and I think it will guide past the meridian (meridian flips are a royal pain and often occur at such inconvient times at night!).
I know the AP1200 will guide all the way around without needing a meridian flip perhaps the AP900 does as well - if you have the budget that is well worth considering. There is also the AP Mach GTO1. That is a competitor for an EM200.
There are many up and coming mounts like ASA that use a different approach. Perhaps worth considering. Not as well known and probably hard to find out how consistent their quality and/or how far they are through the beta bug removing process.
I hope this helps.
Greg.
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