Man! I thought this thread was dead! First let me say thanks to everyone who's responded, good, bad, and ugly. I'm not afraid of a spirited debate, in fact I love it. I'd rather someone skirt the bounds of impropriety with free expression than leave something left unsaid because they were afraid of hurting my feelings.
I'm still surprised, though, at how many people seem to be missing the point. Some of you get it, some apparently don't.
Robert Phillips:
...something as important as this device should not be obtained 'as cheap as you can find'...
Of course it should! As long as the quality is the same. Now this is making some assumptions about what I meant by "decent quality" and what he meant by "as cheap as you can find", so I'll give this guy the benefit of the doubt.
Robert Phillips:
...finding the cheapest SPG and finding a quality SPG at a good price are two entirely different things.
P.S., I did read the original post and understand that he recognised the difference.
See? I think Robert gets it, so I'm a little curious as to why he seemed to be defending Quarrior.
Kangy:
wow, now it's funny to me that I found an argument over a $70 piece of life support equipment here of all places. I'm pretty sure that if your getting into this type of diving you have already realized that tech diving isn't exactly a cheap hobby to take up. Being willing to invest in tech and throwing down thousands dollars on equipment then complaining about the cost of a quality gauge just seems kind of ironic to me.
Now this guy seems to be totally missing the point. It's interesting that his figure of $70 is just about halfway between the lowest and highest prices I've found. His assumptions about me "getting into this type of diving" and my willingness to be "throwing down thousands..." can, I suppose, be explained by the fact that most people who read the Hog board are into tech. Fair enough. But I thought Hog was about configuring you gear in a simple, robust way, not about how it's used.
ams511:
I think this comment is offense to the OP and uncalled for. Why didn't you just call him a stroke and save your sarcastic words. People like you give DIR a bad reputation.
Dude! Chill!
FYI, I'm not offended in any way, and all comments are officially called for! You call that sarcasm? I'm reminded of the line in, what was it? The Wild One? Rebel Without a Cause? Anyway, the straights are beating up the cool kid, and he says, "My daddy used to hit harder than that!" And I don't know how DIR even got into this, except for all those not-so-poorly-founded assumptions, like brass 'n' glass SPG = Hog = Tech = DIR. But don't get me wrong, it's apparent that ams511 is my friend.
Kangy:
I wasn't necessarily knocking the originator of this thread. That was a general comment about the overal vibe from this thread. Nothing wrong with looking for a good deal. I'm a bargain hunter myself, but when 8/10 posts/responses in a thread turn into an arguement over a few bucks it just seems like it went from helpful to bickering
The meta-post! But really, it's not over a few bucks. The price difference I've seen is over 100% of the lowest price. OK, maybe that's "only" about fifty bucks, but still, geez, what do you guys do for a living? For me, fifty bucks is a lot!
OK, I'm not even going to quote ReefHound. I mean, thanks for your support, but let's not get into, well, never mind. It seems to me that both Kangy and ReefHound get the point (well, I'm not sure about Kangy), they just digressed into a discussion of the discussion. Something I'd NEVER do.
Here's what I mean by "getting it". We're talking about one of the simplest, most basic pieces of gear in this whole endeavor (SCUBA diving). I may be wrong, but it seems pretty clear that there's a factory over in Italy that makes these things for several different brands. If I could get one direct from the factory, that would be the best, but apparently nobody here does that. Maybe they don't sell direct, maybe we just don't know how. OK, so of the gauges that I CAN get, which best fits my needs? (as if anybody actually needs any of this stuff) What am I looking for?
I want a top-quality gauge! The BEST! I want the one with the thickest-gauge metal housing, the highest quality glass, the optimum Bourdon tube, jeweled bearings, triple plated, H1 threads, viton o-rings, super-unobtanium mega-turbo electroids! I want a 2-1/2" gauge with a simple, easy to read, glow-in-the-dark face.
Yeah, whatever. They're all made by the same factory to the same specs. You want the one with the smiling fish that takes up so much space on the face that it's hard to read, the one with eighteen different color gradients, the one that costs 100% more, or the one that's everything the other ones are inside, only you're paying for a gauge, not Silvio's Ferrari.
People who unquestioningly pay more for brand identity, false security, and needless bells and whistles make it harder for us who only want to pay a fair price for simple, high-quality basics. That's why I posted in the Hog forum.
but Halcyon did have quality issues, it comes with outsourcing. Look up past threads on their sticky inflator problem. BTW, my gear is Halcyon. 
