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so few high end bins seem to be sold (1 Viewer)

mooreorless said:
Hi Bob, My 10x42 was purchased by the original owner in 1999 and serial number is 577x and a friends is 523x not sure when this one was bought.

I have the 12X50 SE and have been thinking about trading the 10SE for a 8SE . I had the 10SE out yesterday and am now thinking of just keeping it. It is just too good to get rid of.:t:;)
Regards,Steve
Click to expand...

Yeah, I have to agree with you. My 10 x 42 is a gem!

BTW, the SN of your 12 x 50 SE might be helpful. Kevin doesn't have one yet from a 12 x 50.

I can't make head nor tail out of Nikon's SN sequences.

Bob
 
This is a very interesting thread--particularly the discussions of user profiles (birders, hunters, and star gazers), as well as the number crunching on SEs produced. Other user profiles to consider might be mariners, security, and of course, military. In my opinion, hunters should be segmented further by type of game, just as birders might be separated by songbirding, shorebirding, and hawking. Astronomers might be segmented into Milky Way sweepers, star gazers (variable stars, bright stars, and double stars), planet watchers (limited to our solar system), and DSO hunters (deep-sky objects such as galaxies, nebula, star clusters). Regarding security optics, I have no clue (sorry for the poor pun!), but Steiner uses "police" and "security" in their advertising copy for some of their 7x50 models. Mariners use large apertures such as 7x50s, 10x70s, and large mounted 25x150s, but focusing style IF vs CF, armor material, built-in compasses and measuring reticles appear to be the various options.

That's my two-cents worth.
 
Sorry Bob I can not read my serial number for the 12x50SE. I am about the fifth owner and we think one of the owners messed up the serial number with their mounting equipment . I remember when Brock had this binocular you could kind of read the serial number but now I can not even with magnifying glass. I had use of a friends 12SE but I lost all the pictures I took of it with computer crash.
Regards,Steve
 
mooreorless said:
Sorry Bob I can not read my serial number for the 12x50SE. I am about the fifth owner and we think one of the owners messed up the serial number with their mounting equipment . I remember when Brock had this binocular you could kind of read the serial number but now I can not even with magnifying glass. I had use of a friends 12SE but I lost all the pictures I took of it with computer crash.
Regards,Steve
Click to expand...

Bummer!
Nikon also changed the font size of the serial numbers on the SE's which was discovered in an earlier thread by ksbird. A smaller and narrower font on the SN seems to be an older one?? Maybe.
Bob
 
mooreorless said:
Hi Bob, My 10x42 was purchased by the original owner in 1999 and serial number is 577x and a friends is 523x not sure when this one was bought.
Click to expand...

Steve:

Is that 577xxx and 523xxx (leading digits of the 6 digit serials)? If so that is interesting.

Or is it 00577x and 00523x. Which fits the current pattern. The leading zeros are significant!
 
ceasar said:
Bummer!
Nikon also changed the font size of the serial numbers on the SE's which was discovered in an earlier thread by ksbird. A smaller and narrower font on the SN seems to be an older one?? Maybe.
Bob
Click to expand...

The font might be an indication of manufacturing period, but I doubt there are parallel number series for wide and narrow fonts. It would defeat the purpose of having a unique serial number on each binocular.

IMO, of course.
-ed
 
elkcub said:
The font might be an indication of manufacturing period, but I doubt there are parallel number series for wide and narrow fonts. It would defeat the purpose of having a unique serial number on each binocular.

IMO, of course.
-ed
Click to expand...

You are right, of course. I could have been more specific in my comment.
Bob
 
Kevin Purcell said:
Steve:

Is that 577xxx and 523xxx (leading digits of the 6 digit serials)? If so that is interesting.

Or is it 00577x and 00523x. Which fits the current pattern. The leading zeros are significant!
Click to expand...

Hi Kevin, That number would be 5 thousand seven hundred and seventy something and it was bought at B&H in 1999 for $600 back then. The fellow sent me the original receipt. The numbers of these binoculars could of gone up after the "word" got out. I read about the Nikon 10x42SE in Outdoor Life, the fellow really talked it up.;):t:
Regards,Steve

Bob, You are up pretty late or is that like me wake up pretty early.;)
 
mooreorless said:
Hi Kevin, That number would be 5 thousand seven hundred and seventy something and it was bought at B&H in 1999 for $600 back then.
Click to expand...

So that follows the same pattern 00xxxx we've seen for 10x42 SE.

In fact we haven't seen a 10x42 SE with a serial that exceeds 006xxx (i.e. 6,000).

And apart from elkcub one (which I don't think is sequential ... perhaps a different block?) all the 8x32 SE fit the 8x32 SE 50xxxx pattern we haven't seen one with serial above 506xxx.

Hmmm. Only 6,000 of each bins made? Perhaps that's why we don't see too many porros these days?

How many have you seen in the field (on other birders)? I've not seen one yet. But then again I've only come back to birding since 2000.
 
i will have to check on my 8X/10X SE's when i get to the house this afternoon... interesting stuff.

we get gobs of birders at one of my "local patches" High Island, every year from all over creation chasing migration and fall out. honestly i can say i have only seen one very quiet, unassuming gentleman in his mid-70's tote a pair of 8-by SE's, and he tends to really stand out in a crowd of birders sporting the latest roofs.

few would guess his lifelist tops 2.5K... reckon he's on to something after all...

kind regards,
UTC
 
Thanks to both Renze and UTC for breaking the 005xxx barrier.

So we can now speculate there were at least 8712 of the SE 10x42 made.

From the distribution of sales dates they don't correlate too well with serial. I suspect they made large batches of these early on and they've been sitting in stock since then?

Any advance on 008713?
 
Here are my two SE models.

Nikon 12x50 SE
# 350xxx
Purchase date 12.14.2008 (new)

Nikon 8x32 SE
# 550xxx
Purchase date 12.06.2008 (new)
 
Many thanks for that 12x, Bob

So it seems the prefixes are two digit:

00xxxx 10x42
50xxxx 8x32
55xxxx 8x32
35xxxx 12x50

So perhaps they use starting numbers

00xxxx 10x42
35xxxx 12x50
50xxxx 8x32

I speculate they expected to make more 8x32 than the other two models.

So if the 55 is actually in sequence then they've made at least 50,000 8x32?
 
It seems that the first digit falls in the set {0, 5, 3}, where:
0 = 10x
5 = 8x
3 = 12x

The second digit falls within the set {0,5}, independent of the first digit. What could this mean? (What happened to 1, 2, 3, and 4?)

The last four digits are clearly sequential within the range {1, 2, .... 9999}.

Unless more variation is found with the second digit, therefore, there would appear to be a max of 20,000 produced for each magnification.

My guess is that the second digit represents separate manufacturing runs of up to 10,000 units each. The two runs might or might not differ in some way, such as coatings.

Okay, shoot me down. :eat:

-ed
 
Last edited:
elkcub said:
It seems that the first digit falls in the set {0, 5, 3}, where:
0 = 10x
5 = 8x
3 = 12x
Click to expand...

I can't disagree with this.

elkcub said:
The second digit falls within the set {0,5}, independent of the first digit. What could this mean? (What happened to 1, 2, 3, and 4?)
Click to expand...

That's why I think it's a coding not a sequence. And you can't say anything about the independence of the two numbers. We have four observed combiations (Thanks, Bryce for another one).

00, 50, 55, 35.

We haven't seem more variations which I would expect if they were incremental e.g. we've not seen 30 (but we don't have a huge numbe of 12x serials).

elkcub said:
The last four digits are clearly sequential within the range {1, 2, .... 9999}.
Click to expand...

I agree with this too.

elkcub said:
Unless more variation is found with the second digit, therefore, there would appear to be a max of 20,000 produced for each magnification.
Click to expand...

Not sure how you get this ... but I can't believe anyone would produce the same number of 12x as 8x.

My suggestion that they are sequential with different "tens of thousand" starting points (i.e. two digit prefixes) and that you can have:

up to 34998 10x but I think less than 10,000 were made (less than 9000?)
up to 14998 12x (not enough info to say anything else but perhaps 1000?)
up to 50000 8x (at least 6,000)

seems to match bin usage a bit more closely but I don't think they ever got to 50,000 8x32 SE!

Actually I suspect the 55xxxx 8x32 are special or different in some way hence the new serial (which would imply the first kind of 8x32 has under 10,000 units). Remanufactuered? A second design run? Different coatings?

elkcub said:
My guess is that the second digit represents separate manufacturing runs of up to 10,000 units each. The two runs might or might not differ in some way, such as coatings.
Click to expand...

I suspect that this serial scheme doesn't include any batch system that's usually made explicit in modern serials which can include country, factory, year, week, batch number and number in batch (a lot of computing serials are generated this way).

I think we have a set of prefixes (preficies?) and a increasing sequential serial number. And I wouldn't be at all surprised to find these were all made in the late 1990s (97, 98, maybe 99) in a collection of large batches and have since sat in storage or in distributors or in retail.
 
I'm completely in awe watching two great minds juggling numbers as if discussing the weather.
No I'm dead serious!
Keep it up Ed and Kevin, I love you.

Renze
 
Last edited:
Kevin, you may have missed the point where I said "...there would appear to be a max of 20,000 produced for each magnification," i.e., if two runs were actually produced of 10,000 each. There is plenty of room for different numbers of 8x, 10x, and 12x bins within these limits, and also plenty of room for making more runs if the market had turned out favorably. The second digit would simply have an increased set size.

These small sample speculations can easily be proven incorrect by a singe serial number that falls outside the pattern, just like my 8x32 (#550xxxx) got in the way of your initial speculation. It's all part of the fun, figuring out how the industry works. ;)

Renze, love you too.

-ed
 
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