Has anyone done a comparison of the Photon Instruments 127mm refractor with the Celestron and Meade 6" refractors?

"Clayton E. Cramer" wrote in message ...
I have been persuaded by people who have no financial interest in the
matter--and who have considerable experience looking through a variety of
apos, the Celestron 150mm, and the Meade AR-6, that either the Celestron or
the Meade achromats will provide superior detail and crispness, in exchange
for a bit of color. The Meade AR-6 is apparently made in Taiwan, not in
the PRC, which is a plus. (Why fund a country that we may go to war with in
the next 10-20 years?) However, there seems to be general agreement that
the LXD55 GoTo mount upon which the AR-6 is mounted is too light for that
OTA--and apparently has a poor reliability reputation as well.

I'm told (by someone that bought a lot of them for his business) that the
Celestron refractors were pretty inconsistent--worse than the Meade AR-6
refractors (which is pretty astonishing , considering Meade's reputation).
Was this a teething problem with new manufacturing, or are the Celestron 6"
achromats still pretty inconsistent?

Has anyone compared the Photon Instruments 127mm refractor with the
Celestron 6" and the Meade AR-6? I believe the Photon Instruments OTA is
Taiwanese. What about the mount? I've heard that the mount for these is a
little marginal, because the Photon is a pretty heavy OTA (about 15 pounds).

Hi I had a Photon 127 OTA about 3 years ago, and compared it with my
friends then Celestron 6" F8 refractor. The images in the Celestron
were superior to the Photon that I had (though it had more false color
then the Photon the images were just crisper and snapped into focus),
I sold the Photon, and purchased the sister scope a Skywatcher 6"F8
from Hoon at the time. Those optics were even better then my friends
Celestron-(I guess it shows some of the inconsistincy of the Chinese
optics). I now have amongst others an Antares 812GP (125mm F8.3), in
which the optics are sourced from Japan, and mounted into the Chinese
OTA by SkyInstruments of Canada. The optics in this particular scope
are superior to either of the scopes (Photon/Celestron/Skywatcher). So
if I were you, unless you can actually test the scope side by side,
you may want to avoid the Photon.Bob