ScubaPro's new "D.I.R." system

[Gombessa]

Judging by the looks of their wings, I could guarantee you that Brand H had very little if anything to do with those wings.

Peace,
Greg

Greg,

Now that you mention it, I recall someone at my LDS mentioning that Halcyon was manufacturing some of this tech gear for Scubapro. But looking at the product images, I also can't really see much resemblance except for maybe the backplate storage pack.

 

[Splitlip]

I've seen the SP rig in person.

There IS a relationship between Halcyon and Scubapro (look at the photo credits in the older Halcyon catalogues as well as the new Halcyon regs).

That wing is NOT a Halcyon wing however.

 

[Gombessa]

There IS a relationship between Halcyon and Scubapro (look at the photo credits in the older Halcyon catalogues as well as the new Halcyon regs).

There certainly is (as you mentioned, Halcyon's regs are rebadged Scubapros). The question is whether this flows in the other direction as well.

 

[drbill]

Personally I've always disliked the arrogance of the DIR branding.

Must admit that I'm very disappointed with this X-Tek line. I dive the old X-Tek (soft harness) and wings and like it a LOT better than any BP/W I've ever tried. Of course that one came their way when SP bought Soniform and relabeled what was the Trans Pac I.

 

[kanonfodr]

There certainly is (as you mentioned, Halcyon's regs are rebadged Scubapros). The question is whether this flows in the other direction as well.

Judging by the looks of it: Not Likely. I hope that JJ would have the gumption to say "I'll build your tech gear, but I won't be making stuff I wouldn't use." I also doubt that, if it were so, Scubapro would make much money from it as Halcyon already has high prices, and to rebrand and resell that stuff would most likely cost even more. Most divers I know wouldn't spend that money on ScubaPro, not that it's not a good brand but the name doesn't command as many pennies as Brand H or Apeks which have a very good reputation in the diving community.

Peace,
Greg

 

[DA Aquamaster]

Several observations from looking at SP's stuff at DEMA:

1) They had two prototype plates that were clearly Halcyon plates with Scubapro's logo stamped on them. They also had some production plates attached to harnesses and the only difference was the angle of the bends in the plate. So my impression is that they are using Halcyon plates with a slightly different plate angle.

2) They did have one bungeed wing and it was bungeed in the same manner of the Rec Wing - apparently in the wildly inaccurate belief that a wing of as wide at it actually is could be used with a single tank.

3) They seemed to have used a matrix approach to wing offerings with 40, 60 and 90 (eek!) pound wings all available in single and dual dump configurations. And the 40 pound wing comes with the bungee option as well as in a donut configuration.

4) Their flagship harness assembly is a piece of crap festooned with vestigial D-rings on the shoulders and small 1" d-rings sewn on the sides of the padding on the back plate (which they promoted as anchor points for tanks allowing the harness to be used for "sidemount diving"). The only saving grace was that they also offer a normal one piece webbing harness.

5) So the bad news is that a lot of their stuff is overdone crap that harkens back to their S-Tek stuff from the 1990's (based on the original Transpac as made by Sonoform for SP). Apparently very little learning has occurred at SP in the last 20 years.

6) However to be fair, the good news is that you can get a reasonable non bungeed wing with a single dump on what amounts to a Halcyon plate with a 1 piece 4 D-ring plain webbing harness from Scubapro. This is again in line with the X-tek system they also sold in the 1990's - although again they have not really tweaked any of it based on what has been learned over the intervening 20 years. One hopes that market forces will cull their product lines to what really matters and the rest will have a very limited demand and production run.

7) Pull dumps knobs are required if anyone is going to get CE certification (this is per Halcyon) thus Halcyon includes them as well a Scubapro. Thank the CE folks for imposing yet another stupid standard to protect us from ourselves and/or to protect inferior European products. In any case, both the SP and Halcyon dumps are on very long cords that are intentionally long enough to make it easy to cut them off and tie a knot in the end so the size of the knob is not important.

8) What really offended me was the sales reps' complete and total ignorance of technical diving equipment. It's going to be very hard to sell something they really don't understand and the result will be that they peddle a lot of crap to unknowing dealers who in turn peddle a lot of crap to unknowing customers. It's going to take a few years to sort out and in the interim it will clearly be a "buyer beware" situation.

It was in a word embarassing for any one associated with scubapro who had any background in technical diving.

9) Between Halcyon selling the Mk 17, Mk 25, G250V and R390 and Scubapro selling Halcyon plates and related accessories it's obvious there is a mutual relationship in place. Obviously the way Scubapro is configuring and marketing their technical stuff, Halcyon is not going to lose much if any business to Scubapro and at least they are getting decent regs to sell out of the deal.

10) Most of the stuff SP is selling in their tech line is indeed crap, but to be completely fair the link Bob provides to their pure tek DIR system comes close. Remove the CE provided pull dump knob and replace the ungodly long corrogated inflator hose and it comes closer than most to what a BP and wing is supposed to be - and in fact closer than some of Halcyon's current offerrings.

 

[gsk3]

Does anyone else think that we'll see a marked increase in the number of "DIR assholes" running around the local quarries, now that this stuff is being marketed as such? People with no training but who "must be DIR" because of their gear? There's enough of that as it is.

 

[DevonDiver]

IMHO, more likely a case that people will be wearing their 'DIR' logo'd gear, with little or no clue what it is supposed to mean, or where it came from. They'll know it's 'tekkie' and must be good stuff.

Possibly we are seeing the beginnings of the first noxious 'designer label' in scuba diving

 

[gsk3]

IMHO, more likely a case that people will be wearing their 'DIR' logo'd gear, with little or no clue what it is supposed to mean, or where it came from. They'll know it's 'tekkie' and must be good stuff.

Possibly we are seeing the beginnings of the first noxious 'designer label' in scuba diving

Ha, maybe.

But the people looking at the guys wearing it with no clue will be judging their behavior. I've seen maybe two threads in the past month where someone with an interest in structuring their diving in this direction chose not to get instruction for *years* because some local jerks diving BP/W turned them off to it. How much worse will that be when the BP/W says "DIR" on it?

 

[DevonDiver]

How much worse will that be when the BP/W says "DIR" on it?

Honestly......

“DIR” is a German acronym for “Deutsches Institut fuer Reaktionsfördernd "... It's a sub-division of D.I.N.... but deals with contentious and debatable things that are set as standards.

It's got nothing to do with cave diving.... we definitely aren't associated with it...

Spread it around.....