by robgrune » Fri Mar 28, 2014 4:04 am
I'm a western expat residing in China, for many years. Here is my take on Chinese products. The Chinese are more than capable of creating and producing excellent products, BUT truly excellent items are limited to military and JVs with western brands. For commercial, made-in-China brands, the attitude is always do what is good enough for a sale. This means use the cheapest components you can get away with. This applies to ALL consumer products. Examples abound. Big names, such as Nikon, Benz, Siemens, etc all have JVs with western standards for quality and management. But even among these, I have had mixed results; my Siemens fridge is excellent, but the water heater is junk. The Chinese bought the Rover car brand, transplanted this to China, and immediately installed cheap electronics and cheaper parts throughout the car. So what has this to do with RC? Plenty. NO Chinese brand is original R&D: they are all reverse-copies of something, made piece-meal, and all done by people with barely enough education and skill to solder 2 wires together. Virtually every single piece of RC (Chinese made and branded) equipment I have seen here is junk. And, here virtually everything is counterfeit and fake (search for iphone - even the entire store was fake!) I have seen decent reviews for FrSky, but I have opened one to examine and found it had recycled resistors and capacitors (recycled parts is extremely common - the entire ShenZhen area is nothing but recycling, especially for chips). This could explain why the FrSky brand is reported to have unusual and infrequent problems. I am not saying Chinese should be avoided, but I am saying you get what you pay for. I am not brand loyal per se, for I have bought Airtronics, Futaba, Hitec and have found all to be 100% reliable. Yes, I know I am paying thru-da-nose for brands, but I get reliability for this. The Futaba s-Bus is a great tech, very flexible and useful, but very expensive currently. I expect the Chinese will reverse this too and thus offer lower prices, but with lower reliability. For now, my motto is caveat emptor.