Kammerdiner,
Every binocular/telescope producer is sometimes confronted with unforeseen problems. Swarovski had that with the introduction of the 42 mm SV's if I remember well. Everything seemed to go well, the new binoculars were announced with revolutionary lightweight metal housing, but unfortunately when the production run was about to start the new light weight metal housing was more difficult to make than foreseen so it could not fulfill Swarovski's demands. As a consequence the introduction had to be postponed, but Swarovski solved that in a very elegant way by suppllying customers who wanted the new SV with the existing EL and upon introduction of the SV it coud be exchanged without extra costs for the new SV.
No producer is happy when such events occur, but I understood from a leading Zeiss official that it took three years to develop the SV and that it had been quite a challenge to make a very lighweight housing that would accomodate the new optical construction. So I am not so surprised that Zeiss wants everything to be perfect before bringing the SF on the market.
Gijs
