I ordered more expensive ones - in the $60 range, online - and ended up discarding them and switching to wood blinds - just because it worked better for my sun control & privacy. If you plan to roll them up - I'd just go with lowes, I don't think anyone but you will ever notice. I didn't notice mine were nicer unless I touched them.

Chestnut3 --

Great questions about the quality level of all the different brands.
I hope people weigh in.
Here is my one experience.

We bought room darkening shades at a national chain of stores called "Blinds to Go".
Here in NJ they seem to have one of their garish red facade stores
in every big box store strip mall in the state.

They had several different fabric/price levels to chose from.
For basic shades that stay rolled up during the day, they are fine.
(I'm not a huge fan of the shape of their brackets that attach the shade to the window --
but I'm not sure any other company has a more elegant solution for the bracket.)

The company was pleasant to work with.
No salespeople in the store seemed to suffer from migraines.
Our saleswoman immediately addressed the one small problem
we had with the chain mechanism on one shade.

You have posed an excellent question, and I would love to hear the answer from a blinds expert. The fabric is an important component, but the mechanism is at least equally important.

IMO, I would put Hunter Douglas at the top and the other three that you named, Bali, Levolor, JCP, as also having very good blinds. I would add Comfortex to the list as well, which is a subsidiary of Hunter Douglas.

I recently bought black out blinds from Comfortex for my family room French doors, and they are as nice as you can get for vinyl blinds. I hated the old tension blinds from years ago, but didn't want cords on these windows. The Comfortex Envision blinds go up smoothly with a gentle pull. I paid $58 per blind. I bought them from blindsexpress.com

Thanks for your replies. I'm surprised more people haven't chimed in! I will check out both Blinds To Go and Comfortex. I haven't seen either of these IRL so I will have to do a little searching to find them since I'd like to see them in person and try the mechanism.

Levolor is a joy to work with. We ordered a room full of beautiful woven wood blinds from them and because of a mistake my husband made (dumb, dumb) cutting the wrong cord while taking them out of the box, one was ruined. They fixed it for no cost and even paid for the shipping. They have a lifetime warranty.

I've had really good luck with selectblinds.com. Great customer service and prices, plus they will mail you all the samples you want.