caveat emptor on sleeping pads?

I'm a little irked at how some of my favorite online gear sites present their sleeping pads, namely the neoair trekker. Google the neoair trekker and you're given a price range of $140 to $80. Go to the cheapest one and you're shown a photo of what looks like the neoair trekker large in the close-up photos.

Yet what you're going to get for $80 is not the large, but one "as configured," which is the "large torso," which isn't a normal or long length but only 47" -- a 3/4 pad unless you're a little-person hiker.

A good percentage of hikers using a neoair have bags that require a full-length pad (since the bags have no down on the bottom), so that "large torso" is useless to them.

Yet in the ads and on the comparisons, we've got sellers using the anything-but-large "large torso" and using that or comparing that to a standard or long length pad.

Seems like we should compare apples to apples and not apples to oranges. Shakes my belief in their integrity when they don't. They really shouldn't use the "large-torso" as a come on.

Perusing the Cascade Designs web site it looks as though the naming & sizing issues rest in their laps. The new All Season comes in medium, regular and large while the new Trekker comes in large torso, regular and large. The original comes in small, medium, regular and large, small being the same length as large torso. Whoda thunk?

In my peabrain, regular=medium. "Large-torso" implies wide and at the same time does not imply "as short as a small, which by the way you can't buy in this line."

I haz confoozed.

Ever buy anything in the "economy" size?

Shakespeare would never have said, "First thing, we kill all the lawyers" if Elizabethan society had included marketing specialists. (I have very little room to talk, here: I'm an accountant.)

So over at Starbucks the tall = small. I am now confused also.

No help, but I share your frustration.