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The Celestron came with a Cemented Achromat objective that suffered severe chromatic aberration and was reduced down to 32mm!, The Zennox is an air spaced achromat with practically no CA from its f12 objective with full 50mm clear aperture. The Zennox 50×600 on the right on the other hand was a massive improvement over the celestron offering. Why? simply the telescope wasn’t worth the cost. the Celestron had to go back to the vendor. focuser, eyepieces, diagonal, objective cell, tripod etc, but…. These two telescopes are essentially the same, they share an optical tube. Two very different experiences with what is essentially the same telescope. This doesn’t necessarily mean that all their scopes are good, I’ve had problems with 3 out of 5 celestron scopes i own with one scope returned to vendor!. Either thousands for the latest Edge HD or pennies for their “powerseeker” range. Nearly all small refractors are produced in China, yet the variable quality isn’t really limited to cost or brand as we’ll see in a moment.Ĭelestron are considered a “good” brand, selling telescopes of every variety across a massive budget range. The products supplied by these manufacturers vary in quality and price but by and large these scopes all have the same origins. New scopes on the other hand are plentiful, there are 4 main players in the “affordable” scope market that still produce 50/60mm telescopes, these are Meade, Celestron, Sky-Watcher and the long serving Tasco. the alternatives were “department store” scopes from Tasco, Sears, Jason etc and were considered “starter” scopes. These manufacturers were the likes of Unitron, Polarex, Pentax, Swift, Celestron(early) Royal Astro to name a few. Other manufacturers of this era could be split into two groups, the expensive performance models and the cheaper adequately performing models. They weren’t fancy super performance telescopes on the whole although certain models have gained cult status. Through the 60’s and 70’s Tasco telescopes were affordable telescopes that did the job. For some the turning point at least in telescope quality, can be roughly set at around the time Tasco started painting their OTA’s red. By old telescopes i’m referring to scopes made from around 1950 to 1980, new scopes obviously come after the 80’s. A question i’ve often asked myself is this, are old telescopes better than new? In order to answer the question i must first make the question clear.
![Zennox Manual](https://kumkoniak.com/22.jpg)