I'm new to soft pastels, but so far have tried pastels from Unison, Rembrandt and Art Spectrum (as well as a Faber-Castell student set). I find Art Spectrum less soft and buttery (but also much less fragile) than Unison, while perhaps not as hard as Rembrandt. I really like the logic of the Art Spectrum naming and numbering system, which is more intuitive and much less confusing than Unison's, although I wish they'd identify the component pigments on the label like Rembrandt do, as I'm used to thinking about colours via their pigment codes from working in watercolour. The landscape tin selection is small but useful, with decent tonal variation as well as colour options, but I did augment it with some additional pastels from open stock.