50 quid airbrush from Rutlands.co.uk

[spoony_bard]

This airbrush from Rutlands is down from 100 to 50 quid. What d'ya think airbrush users, a good entry point or not worth the cash?

[Connectamabob]

It's another cheap Chinese knockoff. There's a bunch of them flooding the market on Amazon, Ebay, and many other vendors. Most are more or less interchangeable, because regardless of "brand" they're all coming out of the same factories.

Are they any good? Well... they can be, but it's a crap shoot. They don't have the QC or consistency standards of actual AB companies, they're just about making them as cheap and fast as possible. So one may do you perfectly well, and the one right next to it on the shelf may be trash. Materials aren't as good, so parts wear out fast, and replacement parts generally aren't available: if a needle or packing seal bites it, you have to buy a whole new brush instead of just that part.

Whether they're worth it to a beginner depends on how much you're willing to wade through. A proper brush will be more expensive, but it will give you better reliability, easier maintenance, and may even work out do be cheaper in the long run due to warranties and being able to actually buy parts for less than the cost of a whole knockoff brush (or just being straight up old-school durable so parts don't wear out at all).

It also depends on what kind of work you're looking to do. If you're just looking to do solid coats (primer, base colors, clear coats, masking, etc) Then even the ones that are only half-good will probably be okay, buuuuut you can probably get a basic single action from one of the real AB companies for about the same and have the best of both worlds. If you're looking to do fancy freehand stuff, IMO you're better off starting out with an Iwata Eclipse or a Harder & Steenbeck Evolution.

There are people who do swear by these cheap brushes, but they usually fall into one or more of the below categories:
*People who bought one, got lucky that it turned out to be a decent one, and then discount that luck factor when recommending to others.
*Kids who only just discovered Harbor Freight, think the low prices mean everything else must be overpriced, and are still too "I'm immortal, it won't happen to me" to take warnings from the more experienced seriously.
*Old hands so experienced they can make an AB made of sticks and rocks work without trying, and thus can no longer understand the needs of beginners or intermediates (you see this same dynamic in pretty much any skill).
*People who are blind to their own low standards, and thus think because they're perfectly happy with spatters, big fuzzy lines, coarse atomization, and having to scrub out the brush between colors (or more likely, who don't care if one color gets contaminated with another, and thus don't clean even to the standards of an easy to clean brush), that others will of course be similarly happy.

It is super, SUPER tempting to look at the price and think "SCORE!", but these things are cheap for a reason. Airbrushes aren't arbitrarily expensive. There's harsher limits to how many corners can be cut and how much engineering can be fudged compared to other common tools, and the people making these cheapies do not care at all if their products even work at the most basic level. They just know that airbrushes are perceived as expensive, and thus they can make a fortune by cranking out borderline garbage to undercut the market. They know that if they make them cheap enough, people will ignore all logic, and because they're working out of anonymous factories with dozens of interchangeable & disposable "brands", they don't have to worry about brand-based reputation. They make them so cheaply that even in countries with "fit for purpose" laws their vendors can do as many returns/exchanges as necessary to get away with it, and still make a profit.

You don't want to play the "I'll get one of these super-cheap ones first just to try it out" game with airbrushes. Taking a chance on one of these isn't taking a chance on whether you'll like airbrushing, as these can and have screwed the game for MANY people by giving them a badly inaccurate impression. The difference between a crap AB and even a low-end decent one is HUGE.

What a beginner ABer needs way more than anything else is a tool that will give them as little grief as possible. If you're a beginner and want to give yourself the best chance of success (and why would you even bother trying if you didn't care about that?), you're much better off getting a decent brush. That doesn't mean the most expensive, but there is a threshold of diminishing returns when it comes to pushing the costs down. Personally, I would not recommend anything below the Iwata Eclipse line (or the H&S Evolution line, if you're in the UK or Europe) to a beginner who just want's to "try airbrushing out". If you aren't "just trying it out" and you KNOW you're wanting to stick with out no matter what, then buy an Iwata Neo or a Badger 100 for about half that price. But buying one of the turbo-cheap Chinese knockoffs is putting yourself well out into the bracken, and I would not consider it a favorable risk for a beginner.

[Mr. Peabody]

Solid advice. 

[Major_Gilbear]

Pretty much what Connectamabob said.

Beyond a certain point, you're wasting time and money on "cheap" that skews your view if you try and consider it seriously (and thus obviating the purpose of trying something out in the first place). That goes for most tools too, not just AB.

Good tools don't need to be expensive (often they are not), but you will likely find that the super-cheap tools are such for a reason.

I try and buy the best my budget allows, not just for safety reasons, but because I will likely only ever need to buy that tool once if I buy a good one.