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For any of us,choosing an easel should be determined primarily by our working requirements. If you often paint massive canvases 8 to 10 feet on a side and work in a warehouse loft or studio with 15' or more overhead, your easel will need to be very different from the one a painter working in a spare room with 8' ceilings may find entirlely adequate, especially if he rarely paints a piece larger than 18x24".
Stability and adjustability are the most important features in either case.
Perusing current offerings in today's market, high quality and moderate price appear to be irreconcilable goals. Actually, high quality at any price becomes questionable if one looks objectively at the poverty of functional design in some of the pricey easels. Engineering and mechanical principles seem to have been entirely overlooked.
The capability of an easel to move the workpiece sideways is questionable. Even painters confined to wheel-chairs can negotiate that limited movement. Designs that employ pulleys and boat-winches as a lifting mechanism are laughable. The cording stretches and can let the tray down with a sudden jolt when wrapped unevenly on the winch drum.
Bevel gears operating Acme-thread screws have been the ultimate refinement in easel lift mechanisms for over a century. They are positive, reliable, infinitely adjustable and easy to operate. . . but such hardware is expensive.
Mechanisms that rely on screwing friction clamps tightly enough to hold the easel in adjustment are best relegated to hobbyists who do not paint daily. A cheaper but effective step down from gears and screws is a ratchet bar for positioning the tray, but that limits the easel's top capacity to some extent, requiring the painter to dead-lift the tray and workpiece in order to raise it.
The wood used is definitely a consideration for easel designs employing wooden members that slide on each other. Obviously, fine-grained, very hard woods will give better service over a longer period, where poplar, pine, or soft import woods simply wear out in time.
If one has access to tools, some ability working with wood, and ample time to invest some "sweat equity", the best value for the best result is to build your own easel. For $600 or less, you could end with an easel better than anything offered at $3k and more.
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