DoctorGonzo
New Member
So it seems none of the Chinese lights are really very reliable
If you look on Amazon, there's lots of Chinese-branded electronics, and at far less cost than brand names. Thing is, most of them are poorly designed, constructed, and engineered, resulting in an early demise, compared to name brand products that are manufactured in China, to spec, by OEMs like Sharp or Beats.
MPow and TaoTronics are two that come to mind. They're okay out of the box, but suffer from poor quality control and bad hardware job lots (like Bluetooth receivers) which often result in product failure. These two companies, via Amazon, give 18 month no questions asked warranties & ship replacements hassle free, often without requiring return of defective products because they know they manufacture products with a high defect rate but are trying to build their brands at any(!!) cost.
I don't know Mars Hydro's exact business model, but it's very clear that their manufacturing standards & hardware lots come up at less than say, a company like Hortilux would tolerate. Bad soldering and chips that are sub-par are poor manufacturing standards and corner cutting bulk hardware purchases, personified.
If Mars wants to be anything other than a cut rate lighting supplier, they need to raise their quality controls, and if they need to raise their prices to allow for bullet proof warranties & build quality that equals the finest in the market then that's what they should do. Or, they can do what they're doing now, and stay as entry level, inexpensive lighting that people use to get their feet wet before they move on to professional grade equipment.
When you buy an $80 light based on emerging technology that seems like a bargain compared to what's standard in the industry, you always, in the end, get only what you pay for.
Mars has pretty nice customer service on this forum, which certainly helps, but what they really need to achieve, from what I can see, is a product that's more consistently high performing or at least performs equal to their ad copy claims.
-Doc
"The world is still a weird place, despite my efforts to make clear and perfect sense of it." -Thompson