I had a good bit of experience with various Winchester type lever action rifles, both in the shop and my personal guns.
My buddy and I bought Rossi .357 Model 92 carbines in the very early 80's when a big distributor ran a barn burner sale on them.
I think we got a FFL Dealer price of about $130 for them.
We found that if you shot light load .38 Special ammo, they were so quiet that you didn't really need ear protection.
Internally they were a little rough and the wood was the South American hard wood another friend called "P*sswood".
There were reasonably accurate, but we decided we wanted replica Winchester 1873's in .44-40.
So we ordered a rifle from EMF for my buddy and a Navy Arms carbine for me.
His rifle was made by an unknown maker. It was mechanically an exact copy of an original Winchester right down to the flat spring under the sliding receiver cover and a one-piece firing pin/striker rod.
Strangely, the profiling of the receiver on the front sides was slightly off of the real Winchester's.
It has no makers mark anywhere on it, few proof stamps, and isn't a Uberti.
The color case hardening was fairly good.
My Navy Arms was a Uberti and was an excellent rifle.
It was all blue and shot very well. I was dissatisfied with the original Carbine ladder type rear sight so I replaced it with a rifle type leaf sight that was shorter then a standard sight of the type. Finding a shorter leaf sight was necessary because the barrel sight cut was too close to the receiver for a standard Winchester type sight.
The Uberti's use a two-piece, spring loaded firing pin with a separate "striker" rod"
I kept it and shot it for years with our lead bullet reloads.
At that time we were making our own bullet lead to an NRA formula and casting our own lead bullets.
My second lever rifle was a Browning B92 in .44 Magnum I bought simply because a distributor was running a special.
It was a fine rifle in all respects, with a coil hammer spring instead of the original Winchester flat spring.
I never fired it for some reason and a nephew has it now and has fired it. He says it's very accurate.
My next was a Browning B92 in .357 a local gun shop had.
I owned it for about 30 minutes. On the way home I stopped to see a friend and he really wanted it, so I sold it to him for my cost.
It was new in the original worn box.
My third was a Uberti rifle with case hardened receiver I bought in the late 80's.
This one had the finest color case hardening I've ever seen on any rifle. It looked like a Colt SAA with profuse mottling in Colt colors.
Again, for some reason I never got around to shooting it and stupidly traded it off for something else I wanted.
This is the one I wish I still had.
I saw a few Rossi, Uberti, and Browning rifles in the shop over the years.
The Browning's were the Japanese B92, and the Uberti's were from various importers, including Uberti USA.
The Rossi's were basic shooters, rough inside with poor looking hardwood, but usually shot well, if not extremely accurate.
The Browning's were uniformly high quality and all shot well. Internally they were smooth and well made. Wood to metal fit was very good, and the wood appeared to be American Walnut with a plain grain.
I noticed an odd issue with the hammers I saw.
The pocket in the hammer for the mainspring plunger was often not cut deeply enough and if you pulled the hammer all the way back you could feel the plunger slipping slightly in the pocket.
A minute with a carbide cutting bit in my flex shaft to deepen the pocket corrected it.
The Uberti's were all nice, a little rough inside, especially the elevator springs. As was/is common with Uberti's some of the screws were soft.
The Uberti's have a ball bearing and spring under the sliding cover, but that can't be seen.
Some of the rifles had magazine caps that were brazed on, but early carbines all seemed to have an original type cap retained by a screw.
The hammers were all grooved instead of checkered, but I could convert it to checkering for a better look.
All of them shot well, but quality of case hardening varied.
Early it was usually pretty good, but by the 1990's it had changed to a poor quality on most rifles.
The earlier Uberti I owned had a Colt-like base color of dark brown with profuse Colt-type blues and green mottling.
These later Uberti's had a base color of a steel-gray, with dark gray-black sparse mottling.
These just looked wrong, but was real color casing.
I haven't been able to see a new Japanese Winchester '73, but they apparently have some sort of firing pin safety device that's visible on the rear of the receiver as a round "plug"??.
General consensus seems to be that the Uberti is more authentic, but the Japanese Winchester is a better quality rifle then the current Uberti, who's quality seems to have slipped some.