3 ms·

What products are you talking about? From my experience over the past 15 years, most electronics that were high quality and high price remained the same, howev

by jotm 5y ago

What products are you talking about? From my experience over the past 15 years, most electronics that were high quality and high price remained the same, however the cheaper alternatives have gone up in quality by a lot. Imo, the midrange is still there. However the number of manufacturers have gone way up and it's really hard to find something that's quality. You can't just look at the brand name, which seems to have become a worthless concept, companies will sell their name (and long term reputation) for pennies. You need to look at the hardware itself and know some basics about what makes it good and what not. The vast majority of people can't do that. Over time I found myself thinking "I gotta get a new one" more often than "I need to fix it" because there's an abundance of stuff.

eropple 5y ago
One of the tricky things is that the best of those low and midrange suppliers, particularly in the electronics space, are selling things that look visually similar to the cheap stuff. They're just better. For example, if you go to buy a microphone arm, you're going to see three segments. There's the bottom tier of exposed hinges and tension springs, then there's the two-bar articulating models, and then at the top there's the unibody hinged ones from Blue, Rode, etc. which are surely nice but also a lot more expensive for not much more. Companies like Samson and Neewer sell into the bottom two categories. But even if you buy the bottom-tier mic arms, if you buy one from Neewer and buy one from another brand you'll immediately see that they look the same but the Neewer one works a lot better: better tension to hold the mic in place, ever-so-slightly better (and more pleasant to use) tightening knobs, that sort of thing. They can't be spending more than an extra fifty cents on the product but it works so much better that I preferentially buy from those brands even though it's still "cheap". And then you get into those midrange models, which for my money compete very favorably with the expensive stuff while being half the cost.
- to11mtm 5y ago
  Neewer also sells camera type stuff and I'd agree with your overall assessment. It looks like the really cheap stuff but tends to be 'not bad' as far as fit/finish (as you point out, it's the knobs! Amazing what a (possibly metaphorical) extra decimal point of precision can get you.
  - eropple 5y ago
    Yeah, totally. Half my C-stands are Neewer, they're indistinguishable from more expensive. GVM is another example--they seem to pull nearly the same designs for their lights as Neewer.

by jotm 5y ago

eropple 5y ago

One of the tricky things is that the best of those low and midrange suppliers, particularly in the electronics space, are selling things that look visually similar to the cheap stuff. They're just better. For example, if you go to buy a microphone arm, you're going to see three segments. There's the bottom tier of exposed hinges and tension springs, then there's the two-bar articulating models, and then at the top there's the unibody hinged ones from Blue, Rode, etc. which are surely nice but also a lot more expensive for not much more. Companies like Samson and Neewer sell into the bottom two categories. But even if you buy the bottom-tier mic arms, if you buy one from Neewer and buy one from another brand you'll immediately see that they look the same but the Neewer one works a lot better: better tension to hold the mic in place, ever-so-slightly better (and more pleasant to use) tightening knobs, that sort of thing. They can't be spending more than an extra fifty cents on the product but it works so much better that I preferentially buy from those brands even though it's still "cheap". And then you get into those midrange models, which for my money compete very favorably with the expensive stuff while being half the cost.

to11mtm 5y ago
Neewer also sells camera type stuff and I'd agree with your overall assessment. It looks like the really cheap stuff but tends to be 'not bad' as far as fit/finish (as you point out, it's the knobs! Amazing what a (possibly metaphorical) extra decimal point of precision can get you.
- eropple 5y ago
  Yeah, totally. Half my C-stands are Neewer, they're indistinguishable from more expensive. GVM is another example--they seem to pull nearly the same designs for their lights as Neewer.