This is a perennial topic. Well, more than perennial since it's the second time the subject has come up on the forums in the past few months.
It's chiefly in the marketing.... Swaro gives hunting guides free samples, their customers see them with a Swaro and figure, they must be the best if the hunting guide has one, and yada yada yada, a few years later, 2/3 of Swaro's customers are hunters.
However, it's not all smoke and mirrored prisms, big game hunters tend to like larger aperture bins and higher magnification bins than birders and they don't care about how close the bin can focus since they are looking a quarter of a mile away or more.
Then there's the "one-hand factor." If hunters are holding their rifle in one hand, they only have one hand to "glass" with.
Then there's the hat lift factor. The popularity of the now defunct 8x30 SLC was due in large part to its objective side focuser. With this set up, hunters didn't need to lift their hats to focus, and when it's 10* F outside in the winter, you want to keep your hat on, particularly when your balding. Just as mooreorless.
Also, Steiner makes some hunting binoculars with AR coatings that bring out the browns and drown out the greens so big game stands out. You wouldn't want to use these bins for birding.
However, when you're talking top tier, it's more marketing than specs that determines whether one buys an HT or SF. Zeiss marketed the HT to hunters and the SF to birders, but no doubt there will be a lot of crossover, with some HT owners "hunting for bird IDs" and some SF owners "hunting for moose heads."
Brock
