Quote: (Originally Posted by
caveseeker7)
Phi's guess is as good as any, there are only three PRISMs in the UK afaIk ...
those would be the only ones in Europe I gather.
I do remember the term "volume production model" coming from one of the people,
which pretty much would eliminate the PRISM, too.
Anyway, already PMed Alex that the unit should be included as technically it is in production,
has been for a long time, and has the rare radial scrubber.
Am also curious just how well the unit stands up to CE protocol.
Same is true for the WOB, would have loved to know how it compared to the rest of the lot.
Pete always boasts about both, I know the perceived WOB is very good,
but I want comparable numbers.
Yes indeed Stefan, I too would like to see how the Prism fares on the CE tests. Not likely to happen soon though. Unless I'm mistaken, there's only 2 American made ECCRs currently in production-Optima and Prism-and neither are easily available in the EU. SMI told me that the expense of CE testing is high enough to be prohibitive and of course, the Prism has already been tested rigorously by USN, both manned and unmanned, more than any other civilian off the shelf CCR. And it was interesting to note, as you did elsewhere, that SMI published the USN test data on WOB, scrubber duration and SP accuracy back in 2001, which was recieved with a collective yawn. Maybe it was because it was tested a long time ago, when the few units available for sale each had it's own small, word of mouth following, before anybody had made an issue of the relatively high number of fatalities, before there were any add campaigns and attempts to market CCRs to a wider dive gear market. Who knows.
But I do know that absorbing 344 ltrs of CO2 in an average of 255 minutes before reaching .5% CO2 in 18M of 4.5C water with a 5.5lb radial scrubber is not likely to be surpassed. Nor, given the in-out fine mesh radial scrubber and OTS CLs, is the WOB likely to be improved upon. And I don't see any data on the chart for SP control accuracy.
I'm glad to see Mr. Gurr and Jetsam getting down to brass tacks, but without more details-scrubber weights, description of WOB hydrostatic loads, resistive loads, peak to peak mouth pressures-comparisions will be simplistic at best and misleading at worst.