The slope of the best fit line from minimizing the sum of the squared oblique
errors is the root of a polynomial of degree four. This geometric view of
measurement errors is used to give insight into the performance of various
slope estimators for the measurement error model including an adjusted fourth
moment estimator introduced by Gillard and Iles (2005) to remove the jump
discontinuity in the estimator of Copas (1972). The polynomial of degree four
is associated with a minimun deviation estimator. A simulation study compares
these estimators showing improvement in bias and mean squared error
