Originally posted by Ben_Edict You can send it to me and it will a neat place on my small travel refractor, a Pentax 75 SDHD. (it deserves not to be mounted to a Vixen)... I also have some Pentax eyepieces, but only orthos for max. resolution and use on my bino viewer.
Now let's not start saying bad things about my Vixen! It was a good deal and it performs very well for a ED doublet (semi-apochromatic?). It certainly lacks the fit and finish of a Pentax or Televue, but the optics are good and it performs very well.
I admit that the Pentax XW eyepiece is a little over the top on this scope, but it will be the last 7mm eyepiece that I will need to buy. I'm sure there is a Televue, Takahashi, or even Pentax premium refractor in my future some time down the road.
I saw the Pentax 75 at the store last weekend. A very nice scope and very well made, but rather expensive compared to the wave of cheap 80 & 100mm ED doublets on the market.
Originally posted by Ben_Edict Pentax was for a long time the manufacturer of the largest refractor on any manufacturers standard price list. The 250mm Apo. I have never seen one, but it was priced at 2.5 Million USD (complete with mount) and you'ld need a 4 to 5 meter dome to house it. They also make (made?) a few Cassegrainians, but these were special order items and are very rare.
The problem with Pentax scopes was always the price tag. For the same price you could have a TeleVue and most other top class Apos are considerably cheaper thasn Pentax, except perhaps the old Zeiss modells.
Ben
The store only stocked the Pentax 75 through the 125mm, but I have seen photos of much larger ones. The big ones are probably more of a custom order thing, for a school or very wealthy amateur.
I agree that price is a problem with Pentax, but other companies who sell premium telescopes seems to be doing ok. Televue charges a lot more for their TV 76 than Pentax charges for the 75. But Pentax does no advertising at all for their astronomy products, so they lack the name recognition. I could not find a single bit of information on a Pentax company Web site about their telescopes and eyepieces, and I had to dig deep to even find a reference to their binoculars. How sad is that?
They have some astro great products, and it looks like those products will disappear due to incompetent management.