Most disappointing telescope purchase.

What was your most disappointing telescope purchase? Anybody spend a lot of money on a scope and it turns out it wasn't what you were expecting? I'm just curious to see what scopes are mentioned. As for me, I have only owned one scope(10" dob), so I don't have any stories yet.

Brand new ETX 90 from the "gentleman" at Wholesale Optix in CT. Scope was used and abused and set me back over $600. No luck with seller and Meade was unconcerned to say the least. Two companies that have been for some time and always will be on my never again list.

Clear Skies,
Steve

All of my telescopes lived up to my expectations with the exception of the Meade 10" SCT. It was the OTA only, but had way too much image shift, and the quality of the celestial images were not as sharp as I anticipated.

Rob

Bought a new TV102 two years ago to replace my ETX125. Made the mistake of keeping the ETX around until I could observe with them side-by-side. Was happy with the Televue until I aimed them both at M13. That one look convinced me the ETX, despite its mechanical faults, wasn't going to be replaced by anything with 4" aperture. Actually I've still got them both. It's hard to part with anything as well made as the TV102; but it sure was an expensive way to learn that APOs aren't magic. To this day, when I see a newbie being "straight talked" by an APO True-Believer on FORUMS, my hackles go up. Been there...
Bob Young

An Orion SpaceProbe 5" f 6.9 reflector I bought my son for Christmas. Turned out, the mirror wasn't a paraboloid but spherical, too fast to make a good image at any power above 40 X. Orion maintains a spherical figure on an f 6.9 mirror is adequate. Cross Orion off my list.

I thought someone would name the Q3.5? No?

-- William

Meade DS-114. Just about everything on it was bad:
(1) 1/2-wave optics
(2) finder did not focus
(3) mount fork casting was warped so no elevation movement
(4) drive gears striped due to (3)
(5) power cord was intermitent so Autostar go-to died
whenever the scope moved
(6) after alot of futzing around (new optics, new
bearings, repaired gears, new wiring) I got some
of it working and was treated to 10 degree go-to errors
(7) I thought maybe if I just looked at stuff around
bright reference stars the go-to would work OK, but
instead of the easy 1 or 2 degree slew, Autostar would
decide to go the 359 degree route and got lost anyway.

I've been tempted to run my car over it a couple times,
but I'm afraid of what it would do to the car.

For me the most disappointing telescopes were a couple Celestron black-tube C8's that I bought new in the early 1990's and a Stellarview AT1010 I bought early last year.
The C8's had bad mirror shift and average optics. I don't think I'll ever purchase a Schmidt again.
As for the Stellarview AT1010 it was advertised as triple checked. Mine was not. It had a too large focuser that was adapted to the tube, lots of aluminum shavings inside the tube (probably from turning down the wrong size focuser), pinched optics and crooked stickers. I spent a whole day correcting the pinched optics and after that the scope worked well. But this scope was supposed to be triple checked.....I guess it slipped through.

What, no disappointed purchasers of AP scopes? I thought for sure we would have one comment like "I waited 5 years for my 5" AP and paid a lot of money. The scope was extremely well built, but I get better views through my 10" dob."

Here's some ancient history. My most disappointing telescope was my first, a Criterion refractor bought in the 1950s. Even by the standards of today's department-store telescopes, it was miserable. It had an objective a little over one inch in diameter, with a long cardboard tube. There were no eyepieces as such, just a few unmounted glass lenses that you could arrange in different combinations in the cardboard drawtube. Our dog ate the finder scope, which was no loss since it was worthless. The tube was mounted on a little ball-and-socket camera mount, on top of a very shaky wooden tripod. The scope was advertised in Popular Mechanics as having magnification up to 135x, plus extra lenses to give 400x "for experiments". Needless to say, I never saw anything other than a fuzzy blob of light at 400x; the only useful magnification was 35x.

The price of $18.95 ate up my life's savings at the time. In spite of all this, I had fun looking at the Moon with it; don't remember ever seeing anything else.