Lou H
Well-known member
This is a 3x12 monocular with a plastic adapter that allows it slide into the eyepiece cup of Zeiss Victory binoculars and triple the bino’s power. It is not waterproof. At the going $320 street price it didn’t interest me sufficiently to buy one, but poking around on the Zeiss website I found it offered for $183 so I bought one.
http://stores.cccpromo.com/Zeiss-consumer/Default.asp
As a little (1.2”x 2.3”x 2oz) 3x monocular, it works nicely enough yielding bright crisp views with a field of view of ~660’ @ 1000 yd yielding a modest ~36 degree apparent field of view. One interesting characteristic of this little monocular is that it has a close focus of just over 7” at which point its power is closer to 6x…good for looking at insects maybe?
In all the product descriptions I’ve seen, the adapter works for all Victory binos. I have a new Victory 8x32 and found that the adapter was too large in diameter to fit into the eyecup. I fashioned a new one out of a PVC female pipe coupler spacing the objective of the mono at the exit pupil of the bino. This spacing is not critical.
There is nothing new or startling in how the mono triples the power of the bino it attaches to. For a person with normal vision, the focused bino provides a virtual image of the object at approximately infinity with an angular magnification equal the power of the bino. The mono simply magnifies that virtual image by its magnification, in this case 3x. For 8x binos, you wind up with 24x. You could daisy-chain any binoculars, monoculars, or telescopes in this way, and with the right adapter, this mono could work with just about any binos. The major downside to this is that you wind up with about twice the glass and number of surfaces than needed for a single instrument of equivalent power. This increases light loss and increases aberrations. For example, with the coupled monocular and binocular, there are two objective groups, two erecting prisms, and two eyepiece groups.
With the mono coupled to the 8x32 Victory, I have a 24x32 telescope with an apparent field of view limited by the mono to 36 degrees yielding a ~80’ @ 1000 yds fov. I compared the views through this to a 60mm dia obj Bushnell Spacemaster with a fixed 22x eyepiece and the usual 15-45x eyepiece. The Spacemaster won hands down with a significantly brighter, better contrast, wider, and sharper images in daylight. The gap in performance was even more evident in low light conditions.
The 24x view, though not great, could be useful at times you need more power but aren’t carrying a scope. Considering its small size and 2oz weight, you could always have it at hand when you’re carrying your binos.
http://stores.cccpromo.com/Zeiss-consumer/Default.asp
As a little (1.2”x 2.3”x 2oz) 3x monocular, it works nicely enough yielding bright crisp views with a field of view of ~660’ @ 1000 yd yielding a modest ~36 degree apparent field of view. One interesting characteristic of this little monocular is that it has a close focus of just over 7” at which point its power is closer to 6x…good for looking at insects maybe?
In all the product descriptions I’ve seen, the adapter works for all Victory binos. I have a new Victory 8x32 and found that the adapter was too large in diameter to fit into the eyecup. I fashioned a new one out of a PVC female pipe coupler spacing the objective of the mono at the exit pupil of the bino. This spacing is not critical.
There is nothing new or startling in how the mono triples the power of the bino it attaches to. For a person with normal vision, the focused bino provides a virtual image of the object at approximately infinity with an angular magnification equal the power of the bino. The mono simply magnifies that virtual image by its magnification, in this case 3x. For 8x binos, you wind up with 24x. You could daisy-chain any binoculars, monoculars, or telescopes in this way, and with the right adapter, this mono could work with just about any binos. The major downside to this is that you wind up with about twice the glass and number of surfaces than needed for a single instrument of equivalent power. This increases light loss and increases aberrations. For example, with the coupled monocular and binocular, there are two objective groups, two erecting prisms, and two eyepiece groups.
With the mono coupled to the 8x32 Victory, I have a 24x32 telescope with an apparent field of view limited by the mono to 36 degrees yielding a ~80’ @ 1000 yds fov. I compared the views through this to a 60mm dia obj Bushnell Spacemaster with a fixed 22x eyepiece and the usual 15-45x eyepiece. The Spacemaster won hands down with a significantly brighter, better contrast, wider, and sharper images in daylight. The gap in performance was even more evident in low light conditions.
The 24x view, though not great, could be useful at times you need more power but aren’t carrying a scope. Considering its small size and 2oz weight, you could always have it at hand when you’re carrying your binos.