Saturninus
Active member
Hi All - I'm a bit new to this so bear with me. I just received a Pentax Papilio 6.5x in the mail. They are amazing! But I can't tell if my pair is out of collimation, or if this is just how they are because of the unique focusing system...
I've done the quick test of collimation by focusing on a telephone wire and holding the binoculars about 6 inches away from my eyes to see if the line remains unbroken. Vertical collimation seems fine, but the lateral collimation is either way off...or it's just supposed to be like that? When at close focus settings, I noticed that the fields of view from each eye do not overlap perfectly. For instance, the outer left 20% of the view in the left barrel is not visible in the inner left view of the right barrel, and vice versa. The result is that the together the fields of view from each eye look like that Mastercard symbol - two overlapping circles, not a single merged circle. If I close my left eye, I see a different scene than my right eye. The field of view is shifted left or right by 20%.
And yet, I do not have trouble merging images in the center of the overlapping fields of view. In addition, when focused to infinity, the view is a single circle like you would expect.
This leads me to think that what I am experiencing at close focus is just the effect of the convergent lens system. Either that, or binoculars are going out of alignment at close focus.
Is it the binoculars? Or is it my eyes? Or is this how it is supposed to be? Unfortunately, there are no retailers close to where I live, so I can't look through another pair to compare.
I've done the quick test of collimation by focusing on a telephone wire and holding the binoculars about 6 inches away from my eyes to see if the line remains unbroken. Vertical collimation seems fine, but the lateral collimation is either way off...or it's just supposed to be like that? When at close focus settings, I noticed that the fields of view from each eye do not overlap perfectly. For instance, the outer left 20% of the view in the left barrel is not visible in the inner left view of the right barrel, and vice versa. The result is that the together the fields of view from each eye look like that Mastercard symbol - two overlapping circles, not a single merged circle. If I close my left eye, I see a different scene than my right eye. The field of view is shifted left or right by 20%.
And yet, I do not have trouble merging images in the center of the overlapping fields of view. In addition, when focused to infinity, the view is a single circle like you would expect.
This leads me to think that what I am experiencing at close focus is just the effect of the convergent lens system. Either that, or binoculars are going out of alignment at close focus.
Is it the binoculars? Or is it my eyes? Or is this how it is supposed to be? Unfortunately, there are no retailers close to where I live, so I can't look through another pair to compare.