Quote Originally Posted by mainaman View Post
In all my experience with stones from all popular vendors in many price ranges, huge $$ does not translate to better quality necessarily.
The big $$ price tags come from bigger size, perfect rectangular shapes, color ,how clean the stone is, and of course hype of certain mines.
A great razor tested stone can be had from the right vendor for a great price. So my advice to the OP is to ask all vendors about their stone recommendations, and do not believe any hype about mines and colors and so on, that is just to raise the prices. Just look for performance.
You are, of course, correct and there belies the problem with J-Nats. It takes a certain amount of experience honing to discover what your preferences are and if you are not careful you will waste time, energy, and money. I have seen some people chase the "perfect" stone only to find out that when they obtained more experience that the stone that they lusted for was already in their collection. It takes a very good shaving hand to be able to tell the difference in the performance of a razor that is obtained by doing a dozen water laps on a very hard Asagi. Very subtle, but necessary when you are trying to evaluated a stones performance.

Take Care,
Richard