Dorian Gray
Well-known member
If there is one aspect of binoculars that consistently disappoints me, it is the eyecups. You’d think eyecups would be easy after designing a fiendishly complex optical system, but manufacturers mess up in all sorts of ingenious ways.
My latest disappointment is the EDG 10x32. The eyecups are metal and admirably solid, with crisp click stops. They are quite comfortable too, albeit a bit too large in diameter and lacking in ‘give’ for my taste. (I like eyecups that yield to sideways forces when I look off axis and push the binocular laterally in my eye sockets to align my eye’s pupil with the exit pupil.)
But my complaint: the EDG eyecups have a large gap between the fully retracted (‘eyeglasses’) position and the next click stop. After that there are other click stops differing by only 2–3 mm, which is good. When I view with the naked eye, all is good.
When I view with glasses, as I sometimes do, there is no perfect position. The fully retracted position results in slightly too much eye relief, while extending the eyecup the roughly 6 mm to the first ‘naked eye’ click-stop results in vignetting.
I cannot understand the logic behind this design. It is precisely those of us who wear spectacles who need fine adjustment of the eye relief, because we must place the binocular squarely against our glasses and hope the eye relief works. We can’t tilt our head up or down to adjust the effective eye relief, perching only the top or bottom edge of the eyecup against our glasses and viewing at an angle, because the resulting non-perpendicular line of sight through our glasses introduces aberrations.
When viewing without glasses it is almost always possible to adjust the effective eye relief by tilting your head back and forth while pivoting the edge of an eyecup against a brow or cheekbone. So precise adjustment of eye relief is less important for the naked eye, albeit still desirable (and surely easy to provide!).
So why does Nikon assume all glasses wearers need the same eye relief? Answers on a postcard!
My latest disappointment is the EDG 10x32. The eyecups are metal and admirably solid, with crisp click stops. They are quite comfortable too, albeit a bit too large in diameter and lacking in ‘give’ for my taste. (I like eyecups that yield to sideways forces when I look off axis and push the binocular laterally in my eye sockets to align my eye’s pupil with the exit pupil.)
But my complaint: the EDG eyecups have a large gap between the fully retracted (‘eyeglasses’) position and the next click stop. After that there are other click stops differing by only 2–3 mm, which is good. When I view with the naked eye, all is good.
When I view with glasses, as I sometimes do, there is no perfect position. The fully retracted position results in slightly too much eye relief, while extending the eyecup the roughly 6 mm to the first ‘naked eye’ click-stop results in vignetting.
I cannot understand the logic behind this design. It is precisely those of us who wear spectacles who need fine adjustment of the eye relief, because we must place the binocular squarely against our glasses and hope the eye relief works. We can’t tilt our head up or down to adjust the effective eye relief, perching only the top or bottom edge of the eyecup against our glasses and viewing at an angle, because the resulting non-perpendicular line of sight through our glasses introduces aberrations.
When viewing without glasses it is almost always possible to adjust the effective eye relief by tilting your head back and forth while pivoting the edge of an eyecup against a brow or cheekbone. So precise adjustment of eye relief is less important for the naked eye, albeit still desirable (and surely easy to provide!).
So why does Nikon assume all glasses wearers need the same eye relief? Answers on a postcard!
