Binocular or spotter scope recommendations

Those look nice - and as you say, they’re sealed, plus they fold, and they come with a carry case…

It’s an idea that goes back a long time. When I was a spotty boy in short trousers getting into astronomy the advice was that don’t go bigger than 7x50 for hand holding. Astronomy being very different to bird-spotting where bigger lenses are important for light gathering power. Books written in the 50’s and 60’s labour the point that 10x50 are big and 7x50 are better. But i would think a lot of that is based on the fact that 50’s/60’s binocluars will have been ex-Military and may have been seriously heavy. The move to polycarbonates etc. means you can now make big binoculars that weigh a fraction of their counterparts from 50 years ago but are more tough and hardwearing.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’ve heard the argument 8x or 10x go back and forth for decades now. Each side is right, and the benefits or drawbacks of each or either are well-known: just perhaps not so for beginners. In the end, it comes down to personal choice…

Nikon Sportstar EX 10x25DCF - arriving today :wink:
If I’d gone for something larger/heavier I wouldn’t be taking them on holiday with me, so I’m treating that as a vindication that it is a good compromise for me.
Of course I’m sure like radios there are good excuses to own more than one pair!

Now I don’t use bins, not being blessed with binocular vision. I use a monocular, which has the advantage of half the weight and bulk, but need a special technique to hold steady. However I have borrowed friends bins leading to the following comments.

The arguments about power and aparture are all well and good, but how come nobody mentioned subtleties like eye relief? As a spectacle wearer I find most bins do not let me get close enough to the eyepiece, even if the rubbers are folded back, giving the effect of a small field of view. Take off my specs and I lose the astigmatism correction, resulting in a fuzzy image no better than a kids toy!

One thing I have noticed is that some quite expensive bins give lovely bright images, testimony to the quality of coating of optics, but have distinctly ordinary optical performance. Little things that might not be noticed, like chromatic aberration showing up at the edge of the field of view or a trace of pincushion distortion…but I’m fussy!

Now I know that this will make the Leica or Zeiss fans shudder, but I would go to a camera shop and look on the second-hand shelves for Zenit (Zenith) bins or monoculars. They were made in huge numbers in the old USSR, they were cheap and cheerful 8X30s but they performed well, sneered at rain, and were bomb proof. I have seen a pair go skittering down scree on Tryfan and they were undamaged. This is why I recommend them, they will take punishment, and the mountain environment is very good at handing out punishment. My Zenith monocular has been on countless outings with me and is good for many more outings than I am!

To finish with an anecdote, in the dim and distant past I knew a guy called George Alcock, who had the bins to end all bins. They were ex navy, had 150mm, yes 150mm lenses, and he had them mounted on an old dentists chair. With these mammoths and a phenomenal memory for star patterns he discovered five comets and four novae. No good for SOTA, though!

Actually there should be little difference in weight between a 10X50 and a 7X50, perhaps a gram or two in extra glass in the 10X50 eyepieces. 7X50 gave a wider field of view, so you could get more stars in the field at the same time, plus nebulae were smaller so had a greater brightness and were easier to see, but the downside was that the sky was brighter, moonlight or street lighting became more of a problem. The higher power could resolve star clusters more easily and made the sky darker. Incidentally, 7X50 was the lowest power that would use the objective lens efficiently: the lower the power, the bigger the exit pupil, below 7 and you were wasting the light gathering power of the outer part of the objective lens.

Have fun with those binoculars - do let us know how you got on with them. Oh, and congrats on your having passed the advanced exam and your M0NOM callsign!

Rob

That should go down in the record books as quite possibly the worst recommendation for a pair of binoculars - ever! “Well, they bounced well when I dropped 'em while struggling up a V.Diff in The Pass, and the cast-iron case wuz hardly scratched!”

Laugh? - I nearly bought my own beer!

Nah, the point is that the alignment of the optics was unaffected by the impact(s). Taking these things on mountains is a different proposition to a day at the races, where if you drop them the worst that happens is that you have to wipe grass stains off them. On a mountain they had better bounce well…

For the record I usually coasted up V.Diffs in the Pass or elsewhere. Unless I’d had too many beers…the Vaynol Arms for lunch could be an irresistable temptation on a hot day!

We have something similar at work, permanently mounted on a substantial tripod. Also ex navy, except they have a swastika on them. Still working very very well!