This German flute collector seems to have fallen for a pretty-looking yet amusical Indian-made flute:
http://www.pincusklassik.de/floeten/gro ... index.htmlI really wonder if he's so naive as to assume that the noise this device emits is an exotic Indian scale? Hindustani and Carnatic musicians alike would split their sides laughing!
Meanwhile: my stepdaughter and a friend got Tipple PVC flutes and are both very happy with them. They are much better than one might expect: Tipple really puts a lot of precision craftwork into them, and they play exceptionally well -- an amazing value for the money. The only quibble one might have is that these have cylindrical bores, and so aren't a traditional "Irish" flute with a conical bore.
As to the Indian bansuri made of bamboo, I have two by Jeff Whittier and so can highly recommend his work. His Sachdev model, made to specs by his teacher G. S. Sachdev (who plays Whittier flutes), is especially elegant; I have that, and a smaller regular model.
I should mention, though, that these may not work so well as Irish flutes. They have large finger holes which are meant to be covered my the middle of the finger, not the finger tips, so call for a very different technique than Western European flutes. The finger stretch is formidable; Jeff actually recommended that I buy the smaller flute to stretch my fingers gradually so that I could eventually do the reaches for the Sachdev model! Then the fingering system uses half-holes instead of cross-fingering to produce accidentals; cross-fingerings just plain don't work at all. Finally, they're tuned in Hindustanti just intonation -- perhaps not really a problem for traditional British Isles music in simple tonalities, but even so...
And, obviously, being made of bamboo, bansuris also have cylindrical bores, not conical.