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What piece of equipment - whether a camera, scope, mount, filter set, or anything else - have you lost the most money on? That is, what have you bought over the years that has decreased the most in value since you bought it? I used to reassure myself when buying expensive astro equipment that it tends to maintain its value. It's occurred to me recently that this is no longer true. It seems like there is a growing list of expensive, high-quality items that have a hard time selling for reasonable prices on the used market. For me, the worst investment is, unfortunately, the RST-135. I bought it at retail price in December 2021 and since then it has plummeted in value, perhaps because of the flux of new, much cheaper strainwave mounts. I generally like the RST-135 but it's painful to think I lost so much on it. |
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I don't consider any of this stuff an 'investment' and I never expect to get my money back out. They are tools. So the question for me is does the tool perform appropriately to justify the price. I have to say that so far I don't have anything that was really so off target that I thought it was 'bad'. The tracking on my old ETX125 was never as good as Meade led me to believe it would be, but, that was also 22 years ago. Since that optical tube isn't totally trash, I converted it on to a dovetail mount and still use it occasionally. Recently the worst things I've bought were all relatively inexpensive, like the Bahtinov masks from Amazon that are as fragile as a wine glass and last just about as long in the field as a wine glass... Thank heaven for auto-focus! |
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| Anything zwo |
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| I find this topic quite intriguing, and similar to Kurt, I rarely ponder about the return aspect. Eventually, there comes a point where I let go of something I've purchased. I've found that selling on Cloudy Nights usually works well for me. It's gratifying to assist someone who wants or needs the item I have, and it's wonderful that they can get a great deal while I help out a fellow astronomer. However, I must admit that I've been disappointed by some of the professional 'buyback' programs. Their offers can be downright insulting, which I believe does them a disservice. So, not so much a piece of equipment, but more the experience that goes around the changes in my needs. |
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What piece of equipment - whether a camera, scope, mount, filter set, or anything else - have you lost the most money on? Everything other than the Astro-Physics stuff I've bought that I'm pretty confident I can sell for as much and sometimes more than I paid for it. The rest is not an investment. It is something that services a hobby. |
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The Celeston Nextstar one arm alt/AZ mount. They should take it off the market. The wedge for it is a close second. Peter |
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Haha, the nexstar mount! If there was any more backlash in that mount it wouldn't even move! I still like it for quick stuff though. Like others have said, the equipment I have is not really an investment for return or money back. I intend to keep it until I am not around anymore. Of course, I tend to use things up until they aren't useable anymore, like my cars, haha! I guess I get attached to it all because it's stuff I've made or modified in some way. |
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| @Chris White- Overcast Observatory Explain what you mean |
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@Chris White- Overcast Observatory Explain what you mean Sure. and keep my comments in the context that for ME buying ZWO was the worst decision. I'm not saying thats true for anyone else. I have owned 9 ZWO cameras. I had 4 with tilted sensors. One that had a leaky sensor chamber. One that the chip failed after less than a year (6200MM). I had one camera die completely, back to china. I have measured four tilt plates with my micrometer and none were flat. One varied in thickness of 100 microns. I had cross-talk issues when trying to use a ZWO imaging camera with a guiding camera. I think that the way ZWO handles large scale production problems is very poor. The oil leaking on the sensor issue for example, or the leaking 071 chamber issue, etc... I had the owner of the company tell me on multiple occasions that they had issues, knew they had them and promised to get better with QC... and in my opinion things actually kept getting worse. So, I wont buy ZWO anymore. I use QHY now, and the cameras are excellent, but sadly the accessories very poor quality so I use off-brand FW/OAG. |
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I agree....my cameras are QHY, great service, although they also go out sometimes, and Starlight Xpress. SBIG also is VG. Peter |
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| I have been in this hobby long enough to remember a time when ZWO was known as being responsive to quality issues. That has changed, significantly. |
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I won't say the brand but I have recently spent over $4300 on an OTA that went back 3 times to the manufacturer in 4 months, luckily it was in warranty and I was able to get a refund. I NEVER buy anything with the intent of it being an investment. Its like a car if you buy new. You loose a ton once you sign the papers. I think the only exception to the rule is AP. There scopes are really an investment and while there mounts I wouldn't consider them an investment, I'd say they hold there value more so than other mounts on the market. I think Planewave is in that category as well. Dale |
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| *Deleted* Misread the title. |
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| Check out what Stelios here has done with that scope. |
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Been lucky with my purchases to date. With one exception. The SkyWatcher EQM35 mount. It appears that the mount was never intended to work out of the box and extensive tinkering with the gear mechanism is required to get this mount working properly. Out of the box my tracking was 2arcsec rms with a 7kg load, and the mount frequently slipped in both ra and dec. Getting the A/G calibrated was an exercise is futility. Tinkering with the gears, I failed to get any improvement, despite following the guides on the internet and advice from the shop where I bought it. After 2months trying to get it to work, I finally gave up as I wanted to get on with the rest of my life. The shop refused to guarantee I would get my money back in full, on the basis that I might have damaged it due to the work I have done on it - or if it turned out they could fix it - they couldn’t return it to SW - only sell as reconditioned. Rather than take the risk - including an expensive freight costs - I kept it. But it is now gathering dust on my observatory shelf, as I would want to saddle anybody else with this total piece of garbage. I use - and love - the SW EQ6 and EQ5, but SW should be ashamed of selling this mount which apparently needs extensive, experienced mechanical intervention to work. I might have been unlucky, but there appear to be a lot of people out there who have experienced a similar issues. Not really on for an “entry” mount. Bah. Humbug. |
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| I buy everything (almost) used so it’s already lost a good chunk of value. But when I was first starting and knew nothing, I bought a CLS filter that was meant for visual. It didn’t have an IR cutoff and was awful. I used it once and haven’t touched it since. I think I could likely sell everything else at a reasonable depreciation vs the fun I’ve had. Maybe my QHY294m would be hard to sell. I love that camera but it’s not a fan favorite. I likely couldn’t give away my SVBony SV-105 guide camera but it’s a $50 hidden gem. It’s been guiding one of my mounts for almost a year and works like a charm. My SSAG is likely almost worthless too but I bought it for peanuts. |
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Peter Bresler: *** I bought a wedge and never used it. As someone rightly pointed out, if wedges worked very well then why would anyone by an EQ mount? *** |
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Quality astro equipment is a good investment. I have been upgrading for years and never lost much on anything. I made profit on some items, including a Planewave CDK 12.5 which sold in 2 hours. I am getting an A&O Optical 14.5. Peter |
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Baader CMOS filters - a total blunder…. Chris |
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I also had a bad blue in that set. The QHY 294M is not a bad camera. The amp glow calibrated out. |
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Christian Koll: Do you mind explaining more? |
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Some people did not agree with the word "investment." I thought an investment doesn't necessarily have to have financial returns. It can have returns in the form of joy, time saving, achievement, etc. So viewing equipment purchased for astrophotography as investments is fine. Of course, I may be wrong, since I am not a native English speaker. Maybe the word "investment" in English is strictly for something that has financial returns. Is it? My worst investment in astrophotography is a cooled CCD camera that contains a KAF16803 sensor. It was purchased about 10 years ago. Those who know about this sensor knows how much it costed, especially from a camera manufacture whose name does not start with Q nor with Z. Before the purchase, I used DSLRs for my imaging, and I thought the cooled camera will bring significant boost in image quality. It turns out not the case. The read noise of the CCD is about 5 times worse than mainstream DSLRs at that time (make it 10 times if compared against today's DSLRs). This made imaging in Ha, R, G, and B extremely time consuming. One has to use very long subs to beat down the read noise. Very long subs are fine for extremely deep imaging, but this is not what I often do in mobile imaging. So I end up with only using this camera for L if I want to go very deep and if the target is a continuum one (like galaxy, or dust reflection). In such cases, I use DSLRs to get RGB to go with the L from the mono CCD. For emission line objects and intermediate-depth imaging, I use DSLRs throughout. In this 10-year period, probably less than 5% of my photons were collected with this CCD camera. The other 95% were still through DSLRs. Last year I put this CCD camera on a large-aperture remote telescope, and I thought finally I found a good place for this camera. It served us well for about a year. Now it's replaced by a new cooled CMOS camera. If I can go back in time, I will do everything I can to stop myself from getting this camera. |
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| My worst purchase was a Meade (I think?) astro camera I bought early on. So long ago that I don't even remember the model. At the time, my scope consisted of an Orion 130 reflector on an old eq mount with a clock drive that needed a 2x barlow to achieve focus with a camera. I knew nothing about using a dedicated astro cam and quickly became frustrated. Stored it away and then sold it having never acquired a single image with it. The whole thing threw me off learning AP for almost 10yrs! Aside from that, there has been a lot of equipment I've bought and no longer use or it didn't work out the way I wanted it to. I never buy astro equipment with the idea of it keeping value or being able to resell it. To me, each piece of gear is part of the learning process. I do a lot of research now before buying something and if I can resell it when I'm done, great, if not, then it has at least taught me something about what works for me, what doesn't, or what I want to do differently. |
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Wei-Hao Wang: That is what I meant by "investment" and maybe it's the wrong word. I have never made a profit on any astro equipment and never intended to do so. Sorry to hear about your CCD. I really feel for those who bought CCDs at a high price and now have to price them to compete with much cheaper CMOS cameras. Not sure if this is what happened with your CCD, but I see for example QSI cameras that cost over $4k selling for $1,500 or less sometimes. Ouch. |
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Wei-Hao's post is very interesting, and applicable to my decisions. What make was the 16803? Peter |
