I generally look at what the company is saying about their products before i buy, particularly when its a too good to be true situation.
Blackstar used to be horrible about this. Gotham hydro (their distributor) used to put on all their ads and auctions "winner of 20xx Growboys Magazine Cup" or something along those lines. well if you followed the link, it was broken. Then if you researched and found the growboys magazine (the name of which mimicked another actual magazine) you would see that all the pages were blank and the only thing on the site (emag) was the competition that this light won. The details of the competition? there were none: no competitors, no results, no details, just a fake contest. So shady its sickening.
The only thing that struck me on the PG180 was their claim of 21sq. ft. coverage. that's a touch more than 4x5. It sounds awesome, but lessons learned from the past tell me to not believe those numbers for a minute.
the diamond series seem nice, running 50 3w chips drawing 100w total meaning the 3w are under driven (as they should be) though their claim of Bridgelux LEDs is what concerns me. You can get a lot of the bridgelux leds for about 3$ a piece, while some spectrum are up to about $4-5. Assuming they are all 3$ that puts you at $150 cost on just the leds, so with drivers/power adapters, case etc, they must be running fairly tight margins to make it work, though it could.
I try to get past that and just type the led i want into google followed by the word journal, grow, or good. Generally you can find someone else using the light and take their results as a baseline. Be wary of grows that have had lights donated to them or people that sound like they are selling the light to those who read.
A good example of this is blackstar. I dont like the way they conduct business, yet their light has been proven to grow a decent crop.
