Help please

[JohnZ]

I have recently taken to photographing birds and go out most weekends. My wife has now adopted the "If you can`t beat them, join them" attitude and comes with me.
My question involves getting my wife a pair of binoculars. I have little or no idea what I should be looking for except I do not want to pay a small fortune for a pair as it will probably be a fad until the cold weather arrives.
Any help would be much appreciated.

[Keith Reeder]

Hi John,

this is a surprisingly big question - if I can ask you a few questions first, maybe we can get the ball rolling.

Firstly - any thoughts about the price you'd want to pay? It's really useful to have a target for people to aim their advice at (no point recommending Swarovskis if you aren't keen on blowing £1000+! ;))

What kinds of venue do you and your wife visit? Bins that might be fine if you're generally in open spaces with decent light (looking over lakes and such on fine days for example) might be no good in dimly-lit woodland, where better light-gathering is important.

Is your wife likely to prefer lightweight, compact bins, or would she be happy with more substantial kit? At any given price range except maybe the most expensive, you get better optical performance from porro prism ("WW II" style) binoculars but there's more to them, weight and size-wise than roof prism binoculars.

Uou can get pretty good compact porro prism bins too - they're made "back to front"!

Fill in a few gaps John, and I bet we can come up with some good ideas.

[JohnZ]

Thank you very much Keith. I have just been looking around and found some Nikon bins at Warehouse Express. Nikon Sportsters ? As previously mentioned I think I should start with a reasonably priced pair as my wife has fads which may last, or may not ! I don`t think, I may be wrong, that she will be as keen on cold winter mornings to traipse round reserves peering through binoculars.
I suspect that she would prefer something lightweight to be honest. If possible I would prefer her to try some before buying but I don`t know any shops that might sell them.
We have recently been to Rye Harbour, very open, Pulborough, an absolute disaster, and we will be off to Stodmarsh in a couple of weeks which is also fairly open but has some wooded bits.
Can anybody shed any light, excuse the pun, on the light gathering properties mentioned by Keith please.
Thank you.

[ksbird/foxranch]

The "brighter" the view through the binocular, the better it is when looking into the shaded areas where a bird might be (like in the middle of a tree with complete leaf cover). Also as the dawn breaks or dusk falls, there might be a few more opportunities to see and regognize birds.

Whether you get roof prisms or porro prism binoculars, the usual brightness factors are the quality of the multicoatings (that prevent light from reflecting back out of a binocular's lens sytem), and the size of the "exit pupil", (a calculation made by dividing the magnification number, (like 8x or 7x etc.) into the size of the diameter of the front objective lens that gathers the light, (like 32mm, 36mm etc). So all other things being equal a binocular with 7x magnification and a 35mm objective lens (35/7 = an exit pupil of 5), should be brighter, than a binocular with a magnification of 8x and an objective lens diameter of 36mm (36/8 = an exit pupil of 4.5). As a general rule roof prism binoculars are slightly less bright than porro prism binoculars if the exit pupil rating is the same.

A large exit pupil number isn't a big factor if all of your viewing is done bird watching on open shores in the middle of the day. But if "Owl seeking" is your preference, and all of your watching is done at night or when there is only a tiny bit of light, then the largest usable exit pupil rating would be a very important factor in your choice (an exit pupil beyond 8 is not useful because our eye pupils never get large enough to utilize an exit pupil larger than that). Holger Merlitz (holgermerlitz.de) recommends the 8x40 size binocular because it has the ability to be used for almost any purpose, as long as it isn't too heavy for the user to carry or use for long periods of time. A bird watching companion can be very helpful in spotting birds to protograph. Good luck and have fun

Thank you very much Keith. I have just been looking around and found some Nikon bins at Warehouse Express. Nikon Sportsters ? As previously mentioned I think I should start with a reasonably priced pair as my wife has fads which may last, or may not ! I don`t think, I may be wrong, that she will be as keen on cold winter mornings to traipse round reserves peering through binoculars.
I suspect that she would prefer something lightweight to be honest. If possible I would prefer her to try some before buying but I don`t know any shops that might sell them.
We have recently been to Rye Harbour, very open, Pulborough, an absolute disaster, and we will be off to Stodmarsh in a couple of weeks which is also fairly open but has some wooded bits.
Can anybody shed any light, excuse the pun, on the light gathering properties mentioned by Keith please.
Thank you.

[Keith Reeder]

John, if WE are doing the Nikon Sportsters, get them.

Mind you, all I can find on the WE website are the Nikon Sportstars - the Sportstar IVs at £89?

As it happens, I've got an earlier incarnation of those bins - (the Sportstar II 8X20s - you don't really want 10x 25s for the reasons explained by KSbird) and they're really rather good: they weigh nowt, fit into any available pocket, and are optically very canny indeed.

The fact that the latest version has a 25mm objective lens rather than the 20mm on mine is a significant improvement, so as a pair of all-round, capable, optically worthwhile bins, you could do much worse..