Every thread about the Commandery gets jacked by people who don't like the uniforms.
As for New London, I think, from my recent research, they have the nicest chapeaus. They will run you about $100 more than the cheaper ones out there, but as I believe I have said earlier, if you are making a lifetime investment, the $100 is negligible. Go ahead and pay it up front for something you will be happy owning. Although I won't be commander until next year, I went ahead and bought my chapeau with gold trim and a past commander's rosette. I wasn't going to get silver then have to have it torn apart and upgraded or buy another one. If someone belongs to a Commandery where anyone would have a problem with that, I'd suggest finding a new Commandery. We do have one guy that bought a lower end ($300) silver-trimmed chapeau when he first joined and said he'd just buy a New London when he was commander. I told him he has more money than sense.
Some of those $300 models (I won't mention where they come from, but you can get them at a few different places on the web) look, to me, like someone simply took a black cowboy hat, bent up the sides, and slapped a feather on top. They aren't formed the way a chapeau should look. I also looked at one of the vendors previously mentioned in this thread (again, I won't call them by name), and while considerably cheaper, they look to me to be that way for a reason.
If you put a New London chapeau next to all the others, you can spot the difference in the quality of appearance a mile away. They are worth the extra you pay up front.
The only chapeaus that rival New London, in my opinion, are Kalamazoo Regalia (formerly Ihling Brothers or Ihling Everard if you come across an older one). They are a little more expensive than New London. The biggest problem I had when researching what to buy is Kalamazoo's web site only has black and white drawings of what their chapeaus look like. I'm not going to pay that kind of money for a pig in a poke.
I was nervous buying from New London for kind of the same reason because of the fit. Sure enough, although I measured my head exactly, when it arrived, it didn't fit. It swallowed my head. I phoned New London, and they just had me send it back for a smaller size, no questions asked. Instead of measuring, I should have trusted my gut instinct of ordering the size I wear in other hats and what I discovered from trying on other people's chapeaus.