The problem is no one person here shoots enough and has enough money to have thoroughly wrung out a representative sample size of every major compressor option. As a result, opinions vary dramatically. There is one resource though which is absolutely fantastic:
https://www.airgunnation.com/topic/compressor-survey-results/
This aggregates the data so you have at least an educated guess on what to buy. My takeaway was that, for less than "big money" your best options are the Altaros Booster and the Shoebox Compressor. The latter is..... a bit challenging to purchase. It is basically a one man band selling a compressor based on pretty simple parts which is easy to rebuild, and needs that done somewhat regularly. The Altaros booster is based of another pressure booster, and seems to require rebuilds less frequently than the Shoebox, probably because it runs a LOT cooler, however it requires a much much more powerful air compressor as its pre-booster/power source. Ultimately the Altaros is what I went with.
No option is perfect, but one of the aforementioned two would certainly be my pick. (having chewed through a Rong Heng and a Nomad in less than a year) I currently run an Altaros which I update my review on sporadically to say it is still working and almost maintenance free. No need for a rebuild yet.....
As an aside, I considered a Daystate/Coltri, Omega, as well as a number of other big money compressor options made for big tanks. I ultimately chose not to go with them because no compressor is rebuild-free, they'll all need it eventually, and I quite frankly don't want to have to rebuild one of those things. They're also too heavy to reasonably ship somewhere to have someone else rebuild. So I wanted to go with simple and easy to work on, knowing that I'd be rebuilding it eventually.
I hope that helps.
Thanks for the kind words regarding the survey!
My thoughts on this:
1) Pick a dollar amount for your budget and figure out which two or three are in your price range
2) Go to the list of compressors and the sort it by mean (average) hours: https://ql.tc/MaIfkQ
3) See how many many submissions there were for the compressors you are interested in (for example the SPA compressor that has the most mean hours is only represented by 1 submission). This will give you an idea of how representative of sample is in the survey data.
4) Then go to the results and look at the details for any of the compressors that you're interested in.
Yong Heng – https://ql.tc/1V07h9
The Yong Heng is a pretty "polarizing" compressor... It's either cheap junk or a great deal to people. I did combine the various models into one summary so this would include the different voltage and shutoff options. The sample size is pretty big with 87 submissions from owners.
I like to jump down to the question "Have you had any breakdowns or failures of your compressor?" It's not as bad as some may expect... Almost 74% reported NO breakdowns. Honestly that's better than I would have expected given some of the posts we all have read...
I also like to look at the "I recommend my compressor to other air gunners" scale. Again, it's pretty favorable.
And then check out the comments.
(FWIW, I am a fan of the shoebox f10 compressor. That's what I purchased!)
