Originally Posted by
RChung
But the reality is that Stages changed the market not by producing a superior product but by undercutting the price. They sold power meters that were roughly 60% the price of existing products, and sold people on the idea that accuracy didn't matter, only consistency does.
It's like when Infocrank came to the US and hit the market claiming their accuracy was incredible and then found out no one was actually willing to pay for it.
OP - you'll find there's tons of options all over the place that give data that is "good enough" to do absolutely everything
you could possibly want to do with it. Personally I am more of a fan of crank based as it's just easier.
In all of our years of powermeter use and selling through just about every platform the only ones we have had "issue" with in terms of it's performance with respect to the level of training or use we were using are the Garmin pedal based systems, some of the old stages setups. Shimano's crank powermeter systems. SRAM (Quarq) have been great since day one nearly but even now just kind of are pricing themselves out of the business (but the fans will still buy it for at least a while). 4iiii is currently my favorite as I am pretty much completely back over to Shimano drivetrains for personal use. I have bought 3 in the last year and used them in all conditions of training and racing gravel/cross and they have performed nearly flawlessly (one stopped running on my 50th birthday ride a week or two ago but the temp was near the single digits. haven't had a problem with it since).
pedal systems make sense to newer users for some reason but in reality you will find you don't like swapping it. It's like what we used to do with hub based units. You could move them to any bike and yet I built an entire wheel business on the fact that everyone actually wanted one for each bike so they didn't have to move them. *shrug*
Also swapping a left side crank arm is easier than even swapping pedals most of the time if both bikes use the same pedal platform.