Meade Telescopes: The Closure, Models & Reviews

Meade’s Rise and Fall (1972–2024)

Meade was founded in 1972 by John Diebel. Originally, Meade was an importer, primarily sourcing from Japan and operating out of John’s apartment, but their offerings soon expanded. Diebel began providing his Japanese manufacturers with design input, and by 1977, Meade was operating out of a full-sized warehouse in Costa Mesa, California. Around this time, Meade began producing high-quality equatorially-mounted Newtonians with their own optics, sourced from former Cave and Coulter Optical employees.

In 1980, Meade made a permanent name for itself with the 2080, an 8” Schmidt-Cassegrain.

Excluding the failed Criterion Dynamax line, Meade was the first manufacturer to attempt to directly compete with Celestron’s C8, which had been on the market for ten years and was beginning to show its age. The 2080 offered superior rigidity with its extendable telescoping-leg tripod, as well as a DC-powered worm gear drive compared to the C8’s AC-powered spur gears.

A 2040 4” SCT and a 2120 10” SCT Meade telescope soon followed. Eventually, these scopes led to the demise of Meade’s Newtonian line.

Meade continued innovating and often outpacing Celestron throughout the 1980s, but the high demand for telescopes thanks to Halley meant that both companies’ quality control suffered. Meade felt this the most – I have personally looked through many Meades from the 1980s with mushy, fuzzy views at high power. There are some Celestron scopes that had these issues, but I have seen more mushy Meades than Celestrons from this period.

In the 1990s, Meade introduced their LX200 line, which was available in an upgraded version until Meade’s demise in 2024. The LX200 was the first GoTo telescope that was readily available and affordable for amateurs; Celestron’s earlier efforts at similar systems were largely failures. They also introduced the ETX, a 90mm Maksutov-Cassegrain with optics (albeit not mechanics) comparable to the famed Questar, and eventually rolled out the AutoStar computerised handset for both the LX200 and ETX. At one point, they succeeded in driving Celestron to near-extinction, but Celestron came roaring back in the mid-2000s, thankfully preventing a monopoly by Meade.

However, all was not well. By the mid-90s, Meade seemed to have largely become concerned solely about profit. Their customer service was and remained poor, and more and more of their sales became “department-store” telescopes sold at big box stores with bad mounts and accessories designed solely to prey on unsuspecting consumers. Meade Instruments went public in 1997 and attempted to buy the dying Celestron in 2002, being stopped only by the FTC.

In 2006, Meade Instruments moved most of their telescope production to Mexico, citing profitability concerns. They also introduced the “RCX” line, a series of modified Schmidt-Cassegrains they claimed were Ritchey-Chretien telescopes – false advertising. Not only did manufacturers of actual RCs sue, but the RCX scopes were plagued by technical problems of all sorts, and Meade’s customer service quality didn’t help. Various other technical issues happened with other telescopes, and the financial crisis of 2008 further damaged their sales. All of this resulted in them nearing bankruptcy by the early 2010s.

Meade was bought by Ningbo Sunny Electronics Co. in 2013. A lawsuit by Orion in 2019 revealed that Meade and Sunny colluded with Synta, the present owner of Sky-Watcher and Celestron, to fix prices on telescopes, as well as that Meade and Sunny were commercially related to Synta in some way, which led to Meade’s filing for bankruptcy and a subsequent buyout by Orion.

For a while, Orion seemed to be keeping Meade on life support, slowly phasing out or discontinuing products. This was indeed the beginning of the end of both Meade and Orion, as Optronic Holdings (owners of Meade, Orion, and Coronado) went out of business by mid-2024, and most of their inventory was either acquired or auctioned off by the US retailer, High Point Scientific.

Why Meade Fell Out of Favor: Decline in Quality and Customer Service

By the end of its life, Meade used to sell various high-end lines of Schmidt-Cassegrains (which hardly anyone bought), its ETX telescopes, various low-end/poorly constructed manual and computerised scopes, a few nice manual scopes and Dobsonians, and the Coronado solar telescopes—which, sadly, had also seen a decline in quality control in its last years.

Meade’s occasionally false or misleading advertising, poor customer service, lack of spare parts, and constantly changing product lines had always made it hard for me to recommend them as a brand. They still made some nice telescopes, but I wasn’t recommending buying anything from them with a computer involved. That’s because if someone does buy, it mostly used to have issues, and Meade wasn’t of much help with solving anything.

I have had problems with some relatively recent Meade products and needed spare parts, and customer service literally told me to go to eBay and find them myself because they didn’t have any.

Meade Telescopes Reviewed By Us