Raminwood is actually great shaft material, so it's the quality you want to watch.
The problem with ANY natural shaft material anymore is simply that it is so labor intensive that it's hard to make any money doing it. POC is a standard, because at least in the past, it was darn good material, and almost impossible to mess up for the manufacturer. Low waste, low overhead, etc....
Point is, the material is fine, stellar even, but how it is selected, cut, graded, culled, dried, split, milled, etc. matters more. If a Chinese maker knows what he is doing, you'll be very happy. If he is making shafts out of bulk dowels from Phillipines or Malaysia, you will be very disappointed.
I have seen Chinese-made arrows/shafts advertised on Ebay as "pine", but I have no idea about quality, and some of the pics didn't even look like pine to me, but some did.
Now, that said, I did about a $220.00 experiment on some of the Items I had been seeing from China on ebay, and was VERY pleasantly surprised with the results. I bought six finished, cheap bamboo finished arrows with self nocks. They are actually GREAT arrows for the $20.00 or so I paid for them, the only problem being that they are not matched closely for spine. But, they shoot awfully well for an unmatched group, probably due to de facto similar weight and spine, small diameter, and good recovery.
I bought several varieties of heads, from several dealers and they all spun true on a carbon shaft, and looked good. They were mostly 2 blade Magnus Stinger type knock-offs, and the finish and grind were a little rough, but they spin, fly, and sharpen up fine, sooooo......
I bought a hundred feathers for cheap and they are just as good as Gateway or Trueflight, except that the leading point of the feather needed a tiny bit of sanding because they were cut standing kind of high. I bought some glue OVER the shaft heads for bamboo shafts (without tapers) and I didn't like how fat the aluminum slip over ferrule is, but the steel was great and they were tough. I bought some Bodkin looking slip-over heads, and they were cool as heck. I bought Judo knock-offs, and they were great.
Lastly, I bought 100 matched bamboo shafts for about 129.00 with shipping, matched and graded. They are FANTASTIC. They are thick-walled tonkin shoots, small diameter, matched the spine nicely, came to me pretty straight, and ZERO culls. I DID put a lot of work into them getting them control-freak level, broadhead quality straight, and the varying diameter made me learn some new skills, but they shoot awesome and I have taken a cow elk and small muley this year with them. They are tough, etc...
So, I personally would give the dealers the benefit of the doubt regarding quality at this point, but do as much research as you can....
