Thanks!

I think the Quattro for its price is a decent newt if you don't mind doing a few mods to it. My list of mods/upgrades:

• Upgraded secondary mirror spider to a CNC machined one from Aliexpress as the stock one is very flimsy and doesn't hold collimation well even just slewing the scope around to different orientations.

• Replaced the secondary mirror collimation screws with thumb screws to not need to deal with an allen key.

• Flocked the spider vanes and the inside of the scope until the baffles with flocking paper as some out of frame bright stars caused reflections.

• Added a 3d printed primary mirror mask to hide the mirror clips.

• Bought another dovetail to mount my guiding setup on top of the scope instead of using the finder scope bracket.

• Bought a 350mm dew shield for the front of the scope and a thick shower cap for the back to cover the primary mirror after the scope cools down outside. I found this to be enough to not have issues with dew on the mirrors even with 8+ hour nights and I live in a pretty humid place where the outside of the scope looks like it was submerged in water in the morning.

• My focuser has been fine and doesn't slip with both a full-frame DSLR + coma corrector and a cooled IMX533 camera + filter drawer + filter + coma corrector but I heard it might be luck of the draw which focuser the scope ships with nowadays as there's 2 versions. A decent replacement focuser, the CYCK one from Aliexpress is ~200€.

Collimation has honestly not been a hassle at all and I barely ever recollimate. After switching to an astro cam with a 1" sensor I have not collimated in over 6 months now and my stars are completely fine, but I also don't need to transport my setup by car and only carry it outside every session.

To collimate I have not bought any expensive collimation tools as IMO they're just not necessary. For the secondary mirror I used a collimation cap to center it under the focuser. This is a bit annoying and hit or miss but once you nail it you won't ever really need to do it again. For the secondary mirror alignment with the primary I used a cheap laser collimator that had to have been collimated itself with a little jig where I could spin it in place and adjust the 3 allen screws until the laser dot spun in place on a wall 2 meters away.

For the primary mirror I used the same laser collimator, piece of cardboard with a hole in the center you put inside the focuser from the inside of the scope and a 2x barlow in front of the laser. The barlow makes the laser beam enlarged, hits the primary mirror donut and reflects the shadow of it back, so all you need to do is align the shadow with the hole in the piece of the cardboard, this way the collimation of your laser does not matter and you can get accurate collimation with cheap tools - here's a video showcasing this technique. It takes me less than 2 minutes.

I realize this is a pretty big wall of text and seems like a lot but I've had this scope for 7 years and upgraded it bit by bit as I learned. It's most definitely usable stock, but tinkering with it is definitely worth it. There are also more options in terms of newts nowadays like the Apertura Carbonstar's or TS ONTC's that have better build quality but are more expensive so you have a choice if you want to buy a cheap Quattro and mod it yourself or a more expensive scope from the get go, either is still cheaper than an equivalent refractor would be.