[Wavytone]

Hi Lewis, I bought an SXD a few years ago to go with my 180 mm Mak and 4" f/7 refractor and rapidly learned to hated it for many reasons - it drove me nuts, and sold it after a few months:

- The mount IMHO is fine for visual use but mechanically not adequate for astrophotography - the periodic geartrain errors, backlash in declination, flexure are all far worse than I expected. One point in particular is that the worm gears are inadequate (too small, not stiff enough and with too much movement) for anything bigger than a short 4" refractor;
- In windy conditions with a scope on top it vibrated quite a fair bit. It isn't nearly as solid as it looks.
- The clutches on mine worked OK, but there is a slight tendency for each axis to rotate a little as the clamp is applied. really annoying as you then have to use the handcontroller to move it back on target;
- Once calibrated on stars you have to leave it clamped and then slew electrically around the sky; it sounds noisy as bloody coffee grinder and its not fast; to the point of rapidly becoming irritating;
- Yes in the southern sky the catalog has more than a few problems;
- My eyesight couldn't cope well with the Skybook hand controller, much of the time it was either blinding in the dark or too dim/unreadable;
- The user interface is very clunky, like an old arcade game from the 1970's with too much small text that is unreadable;
- It can't interface to software on an iPhone/iPad.

I've always thought the Skywatcher EQ5/EQ6 mounts were a tad small and flimsy despite seeing people putting 8" SCT's on them. The next step up was a Losmandy G11 but I wasn't prepared to spend that much on something I may only use 4-6 times a year.

But... having seen the new Skywatcher AZ-EQ6, that is something else and it does all the things I really wanted in a mount. Looks like they have kept the useful bits from the EQ6 and then asked a bunch of real observers "now what would I really like"... and gone and done all those things. And it looks a lot better thought out and engineered than the competition from Meade.

I am getting ready to buy one of these mounts early 2013...