tridacna:
I've ordered from Joe Divers. They are fine. No problems whatsoever. Be careful when buying from the Internet however. According to many on the baord, equipment ordered online is highly likely to burst, fail, or break at a moments notice especially when you least expect it. Equipment bought from your LDS is much more expensive but because it has a manufacturer's warrant will never fail. Your wallet is also more likely to be thinned out by the LDS so you will carry less weight when you travel. Now that's a big plus.
Seriously, shop around the net, then get your LDS to at least try and come close to those numbers. Remember that it's all about the service.
Tridacna,
your statement that "equipment ordered online is highly likely to burst, faiil, for break at a moements notice" is very false and misleading.
95% to 100% of the time it's the exact same gear as what you buy at your LDS.
Equipment ordered online is no more highly likely to "burst" or "fail" than equipment bought at a LDS.
Many of the "online dealers" are true regular LDS's trying to keep alive by offering online sales also. To make the above statement, do you imply that they offer "suspect goods" that are of fake or lessor quality?
In fact, there are some LDS's I wouldn't buy at. Some of their requlators have been sitting in that "glass case" for 4 to 5 years and would be more likely to have dry-rotted diaphrams based purely on shelf-age of the product.
Now there are a few 'grey market' online shops that are not forthcoming that they sometimes aren't authorized dealers or swap something like European models with foreign language manuals, but even that is limited.
perhaps your message was to get the diver to try his LDS first, which I agree with, but assement of online shops as likely "failure points" of equipment is not the way to point someome.
As for buying from
JoeDiver, the fact they won't publish a phone number for customer service is reason enough for me to buy elsewhere.
That just shows they don't want to have to deal/talk with their customers. There are many other online shops that are true dive shops that excell in customer service that will give you the same great prices and also provide you a toll-free phone number to help you with any purchase or customer service issues. Shops like
Dive Sports or
Scuba Toys would get my vote based on that.
many others here are very happy with Scuba Toys. Many other are happy with Dive Sports. I've bought a majority of my gear from them and Phil goes out of his way to give you great customer service and will beat or match any price.
