Re: Rules of Evidence (S&T January Editorial)

On Sat, 25 Nov 2006 23:31:22 GMT, gobbletwo <gobble-two@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

I just received my issue and was disheartened with the Editorial, as
well as the advertisement next to it.

Comments are solicited. ;-)

jon

I would hardly expect S&T to do anything other than support their
biggest advertiser. But I do think that the editorial raises some
good points, which I'll get to later.

My own opinion on the R-C lawsuit is that it's high time Meade and
others in the industry got called to task for what IMO are deceptive
marketing practices. One of the apologies for Meade in the editorial
is that this sort of thing has been going on for years in the eyepiece
realm, where we have "Super-Plossls" and the like with 5 or more
elements. Well, I've been miffed about that for years.

The 4-element Plossl eyepiece design has over decades built up a well-
deserved reputation as an excellent, inexpensive general-purpose
eyepiece. If someone comes along later and improves the design by
adding another element, I think that's great. But to call it
"Super-Plossl", so that you piggyback on the reputation that the real
Plossl design has earned, is at best ethically disingenuous and at
worst a deliberate attempt to trick consumers into buying something
other than what they thought they were buying.

Which brings me to one of the points of the editorial. It points out
that the Meade RCX optical design adds a corrector plate that makes
the light reflecting off a spherical primary mirror appear at the
secondary as if it had reflected off a hyperbolic mirror. This lets
you use a much cheaper to manufacture spherical primary, yet still
get the wide, flat field of the Ritchey-Chretien design. I agree with
the S&T editor that this is precisely the sort of clever innovation
that we should encourage.

But don't call the result a Ritchey-Chretien, because it isn't.
Again, as in the case with "Super-Plossl", this is poaching on the
hard-earned reputation of another design, is at best ethically
dodgy, and, as we see from the lawsuit, at worst an actionable tort.
Or perhaps even criminal consumer fraud.

I have heard nothing but good things about the performance of Meade's
RCX optics. The only issue that I and others have had is with the
attempt to market the RCX as something that it isn't.

The merits of the lawsuit are for the court to decide. But if it
puts a stop to "Super-Plossl" and all the other deceptive marketing
pitches, then it will have served a useful purpose.

-Paul W.
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