Poorly designed with mediocre optics.

I have spent the evening oberserving with two of these models, on different occasions - one was a 12", and one was a 16". First off, this is a very cheaply made "truss" dob. All of the components that should be wood are actually made of cheap particle board. It wouldn't take very long for it to fall apart after a few nights of dewy conditions. The "mirror box" and "secondary cage" are really just sections of cheap tubing like you would have in an Orion solid-tube dob. It looks like Meade simply cut out the middle of the telescope, and put some trusses in there.

Setup time is not bad, but the whole thing is horribly heavy for it's size, because the base is made of particle board instead of wood, which kind of mitigates the point of the tube being lighter. Once setup, the first annoyance is the collimation screws, which are poorly machined and difficult to use - setting collimation on this telescope is an excercise in patience - more on this later.

Observing with this telescope, the first thing you will notice is that the movement is horrible. It feels way too loose on the az axis, and way too stiff on the alt. This is because the designers decided to use incredibly undersized bearings on the alt, and then use a lazy suzan type bearing for the az. The combo is incredibly annoying, as it requires a lot of force to move the scope up and down, but the scope is so "loose" in the az that it will want to spin as you are trying to force it up and down - horrible design. Also, forget about ever adding any type of DSC's to this scope, as the undersized bearings are concave, so you will never be able to add encoders.

The optical quality is mediocre, but acceptable. Both samples I saw suffered from astigmatic mirrors, and had overall correction to approx. 1/4 wave, with some zonal error. At this price, one would not expect much more than the minimum to meet "diffraction limited", so this is acceptable. The bigger problem with this telescope, however, is that the mirror has poor coatings - I compared this scope side by side with a Discovery 12" dob, and the images in the Discovery were substantially brighter (and also much sharper due to the better mirror in the Discovery). The views were so much dimmer in the Meade that it felt like I was looking through an 8" scope, not a 12". But the worst problem is that on both samples of the Meade that I used, the mirror would tend to quickly go out of collimation while observing. I began checking it every half hour, and would have to retweak the collimation again.

All in all, the design of this scope is horribly thought out, and horribly executed. The optics are barely acceptable, and the whole telescope exudes a very cheap, flimsy feel. It would need a lot of modification to make it better, and would still hardly be worth it at the end of the day, IMHO. Sadly, this seems to be par for the course with most of the scopes I have seen from Meade these days - a very sad state of affairs from a company who once made very nice telescopes in the USA instead of marketing these substandard Chinese imports.

I would recommend to anyone considering one of these to save your money for 6 months and get a Discovery or other better built telescope. You will be glad you waited in the end as you will have a much better instrument.

Overall Rating: 2
Optics:3 Mount:1 Ease of Use:1 Value:3
Weight: 11
Date: 08/19/2008 06:31:41 pm PST

Replies: 0

Wonderful optics in an affordable package. It is really a hard telescope to beat for what you are paying. The mirror quality far exceeds typical Chinese scopes, as does the hardware. Does not use cheap particle board, but instead uses real birch plywood construction. Movements are very smooth and easy. JMI focuser is excellent. My only complaint is that it is not balanced well when using 2" eyepieces.

Overall Rating: 9
Optics:9 Mount:8 Ease of Use:10 Value:10
Weight: 11
Date: 02/15/2005 05:10:04 pm PST

Replies: 0

A nice, inexpensive filter that will show the white-light features of the sun. Not as sharp or contrasty as my Kendrick-Baader filter, which I prefer over the Orion.

Overall Rating: 6
Optics:6 Value:7
Weight: 11
Date: 12/19/2003 12:48:29 pm PST

Replies: 0

Outstanding eyepiece. Images are razor sharp across the entire field in my f/5 scope. As with the XL 10.5, the XW shows excellent contrast and light transmission. The excellent contrast provided really makes objects and fine details "pop" with this EP. The only drawback is that this EP is quite expensive. That being said, this EP is better than any other I have used in this focal length.

Overall Rating: 10
Optics:10 Value:8
Weight: 11
Date: 12/03/2003 04:18:07 pm PST

Replies: 0

It takes alot of fiddling to get the two eyepieces to focus together. Everytime you change EP's, you again have to go through this routine.

In comparison to DM's, this binoviewer loses alot of contrast, and suffers greatly from light-reduction.

Definitely the "low end" of binoviewers. I found them very frustrating to use.

-UPDATE -

I see that Harry himself is trying to discredit me here. The above comments represent my personal asessment of his 2" units - I have used several models of binoviewers, and Harry's were far from the top of the list. I stand by my assessment that these required lots of fiddling, lose contrast, and were frustrating to use - as always, YMMV.

Since Harry is the manufacturer of this product, he is definitely going to offer biased opinions of his products. I think it is quite unscrupulous of him to offer reviews of his own products on this forum - they should definitely be taken with a grain of salt. I don't see any other manufacturers of astronomy products offering reviews on this site, save for Harry.

Personally, I would hope that the criticisms here would trigger Harry to consider design changes to his units, instead of triggering defensive comments.

As for the claim that I work for Denkmeyer, that is ridiculous.

Overall Rating: 3
Performance:4 Value:2
Weight: 11
Date: 11/05/2003 02:38:28 pm PST

Replies: 2