I have a Meade LXD75 SN8 and use Omni Plossl EPs. The edges were soft on the Plossls near the field stops, so I decided to try a 2.5X Powermate and slow the OTA down to f/10. I had not had much luck with an Omni 2X Barlow, as things just got worse and the longer EPs became useless with way too much eye relief. The Powermate produced excellent results with all EPs down to 6mm. The 4mm has an exit pupil too small to be useful when used with the Powermate, but thats just the laws of physics at work. Now all my EPs are sharp to the edge and color correction is even better than before. I can now achieve magnifications up to 338X with my 8 f/4 scope. I easily split the double double in Lyra last night at 169X. I could easily see black space between the stars. Only the seeing conditions now limit me on my magnification. On deep sky objects, the background stays black and contrasty. There is very little light loss introduced by the Powermate.

I had been searching for a solution to imaging with my new olympus E-510 and a coronado PST CAK telescope and had gone through many different solutions without much satisfaction. The PST has a very limited back focus making imaging difficult, and getting the image size appropriate on the camera sensor was difficult. Using the 2.5x powermate with the t-ring adapter gave me a perfectly sized and sharp image with enough backfocus to add an additional K-line filter between the powermate and the PST to further narrow the spectral resolution.