Do the owners of both Zeiss SF and Swarovski EL/NL feel they are uncomfortable for the different color cast? (3 Viewers)

[wdc]

Zeiss - warm led light
Swaro - cool led light
Leica and nikon - incandescent light

Some will understand exactly what i mean.

Egad. Just for fun, here's an older analogy, and horribly inaccurate as well:
Nikon and Leica: Kodachrome
Zeiss: Fuji
Swarovski: Ektachrome

To be 'more serious', the color differences between these binoculars are really quiet and small, nowhere near as vividly portrayed by these differences in film stock.

 

[mfunnell]

Egad. Just for fun, here's an older analogy, and horribly inaccurate as well:
Nikon and Leica: Kodachrome
Zeiss: Fuji
Swarovski: Ektachrome

To be 'more serious', the color differences between these binoculars are really quiet and small, nowhere near as vividly portrayed by these differences in film stock.

Very true (esp. the small differences bit). And using a digital photography analogy, some of us do the equivalent of “automatic white balance” in our heads, making differences in colour cast hard for us to see and of less importance to us in most circumstances.

…Mike

 

[Troubador]

Egad. Just for fun, here's an older analogy, and horribly inaccurate as well:
Nikon and Leica: Kodachrome
Zeiss: Fuji
Swarovski: Ektachrome

To be 'more serious', the color differences between these binoculars are really quiet and small, nowhere near as vividly portrayed by these differences in film stock.

Would that Kodachrome be 25, 64 or 200?

 

[MiddleRiver]

Would that Kodachrome be 25, 64 or 200?

I only ever shot 25. THAT was the Kodachrome that made it synonymous with superb color, grain, contrast...

 

[Passakorn]

Eventually I get a Zeiss Victory pocket 8x25 and I can happily report that I have no problem switching back and forth between the pocket and EL8.5x44. So happy ending for me. Thank you so much for all of the comments.

 

[Zedster]

Lee,

when I got my Zeiss SF 8x42 it was a very foggy day here, too bad I would have liked to have tested the glass outside.
So I played around with the SF, eyepiece cups, focusers etc.

When I stopped in the fog I got a slight shock, I saw a very clear green cast.
I then picked up a Swarovski and here the fog was really grey, it was the same with another Swarovski.

I still don't have a sufficient explanation why I see this green so clearly on the Zeiss, the first time I saw it was in a FL and that was probably 15 years ago, at that time I had never heard of this phenomenon before.

Andreas

So when you look at albinos and they have the color transmission graph you'll see that sometimes more of one color is transmitted through the lens. In most instances this is invisible to the eye but if you look at something where there is a broad spectrum of light, say snow or clouds, then it will appear tinged that color that has the higher transmission. In Zeiss's case this is often in the green range but to make matters worse as you age your eyes degrade in the yellow/reds and as such, you'll be already biased to the greens and blues.

But just to complicate matters, what you "see" ISN'T what your brain interprets. Your brain says "snow is white" and this is a huge bias. So much so that you can't actually trust the image is what you think it is. Color is a weird thing and your brain interprets the signals in ways that made sense a million years ago when you were running away from a lion. I find it fascinating just how much of what we "see" is completely made up by your brain.

So when you picked up those SFs and looked at fog you though "yuck, that's green" but then 15 minutes later you can't even see it. So that is why Lee is completely untroubled by the issue.

 

[Zedster]

Eventually I get a Zeiss Victory pocket 8x25 and I can happily report that I have no problem switching back and forth between the pocket and EL8.5x44. So happy ending for me. Thank you so much for all of the comments.

I got them for my wife and they always astonish me when I look through them. They are amazing bins.

 

[Maljunulo]

……. as you age your eyes degrade in the yellow/reds and as such, you'll be already biased to the greens and blues.

That is neither my understanding, nor my experience.

As we age, our lenses become yellowed, thereby filtering out the violet end of the spectrum.

Perhaps I didn’t read your comment correctly.

 

[Conndomat]

Post 46,

It's not as complicated as you think.

I see a basic color tone at Zeiss, at Leica and at Swarovski, all three manufacturers have a different basic character IMO.
It even differs in the individual series.
I see a certain green touch in the whole picture from the SF, not just in one color spectrum.

Andreas

 

[Zedster]

That is neither my understanding, nor my experience.

As we age, our lenses become yellowed, thereby filtering out the violet end of the spectrum.

Perhaps I didn’t read your comment correctly.

The lenses yellow, yes. Also the receptors in the eye degrade.

 

[mulligatawny owl]

I love my SF 8x42 but find that switching between it and my EL 8x32 field pro during the daytime doesn't favour the SF to my eyes. Up until near dusk I've come to prefer the pristine washed clean whiteness of the EL image. I definitely notice a green hue to the SF in comparison. Your eyes soon adjust and you forget it though.

 

[eronald]

My take on this is that color is psychophysics, somewhere between psychology and physics and therefore measuring instruments are not always a reliable substitute for user perceptions, especially when such user impressions are recurrent. For color casts, an interesting question is exactly how white adoption happens when a user looks through a binocular, as white adoption should invariably cancel out any impression of a color cast. (I was an ICC member and am familiar with color measurement; I learnt colorimetry from Prof. Hunt, and own 6 or 7 spectros).

In the case of the SF, the two or three samples I looked through gave a greenish color impression, but they may have been early versions.

Frankly, I’d go with the subjective - if you like the color impression of a binocular you like it, if it disturbs you you might as well choose another model. Be sure to look through the one you buy, I had a Zeiss VP which had a green cast, the replacement doesn’t.

Edmund

 

[Maljunulo]

“Measuring instruments” are generally regarded as objective …… observers are certainly not.

 

[eronald]

“Measuring instruments” are generally regarded as objective …… observers are not.

There is a subtlety in color: It is a percept. Measurement gives you spectral transmission (or reflection) data - how that spectrum determines a color perception depends on the observer and the viewing conditions. Just believe me, I spent 15 years of my life doing this sort of cr*p, even designed a colorimeter myself, sat on the ICC which is a standards body, and have some sort of idea how it works.
So my conclusion is that if you have a set of people you trust who say “the color of this thing is like this”, that’s usually good enough.

Edmund

 

[Maljunulo]

Color is indeed a percept, that is my point.

We can measure the Na lines all day at 5890/5896 Å, but no human has any clue what those lines actually look like to any other human.

 

[kimmik]

The psychology of colours to me is that pink tint leads you to like the subject more (think sunset), green tint makes it easier to pull a trigger (think wicked witch of the west), and blue tint feels fresh and clean (think blue sky after rain).

 

[Maljunulo]

Exactly, and the farther we wander off the Path of Objectivity, the more we wade into the Swamp of Subjectivity.

If it weren’t for this, the present forum probably would collapse, since so many of our discussions are of the “I see it/I don’t” nature.

 

[Gijs van Ginkel]

Binocular producers have to rely on objective standards to establish the color reproduction of their instruments. To do so, they measure the transmission spectra of these instruments and compare it with the spectral sensitivity curve of the "standard" human eye and they calculate the "Farbstich"of the image using an established standard for it. They have no other way to go, since the color sensitivity of the different eyes can vary a lot.
If we now compare different transmission spectra we can oberve for example that in many Swarovski binoculars, the transmission spectra are almost a straight line over a broad wavelenght range yielding an almost perfect color reproduction . Other binocuar producer want to have their instrument to have a "warm"color representation with a tiny yellow-red transmission maximum in their spectra.
But you can read all this in a review paper I wrote especially for this reason entitled "Color vision, brightness, resolution and contrast in binocular images". It is published on the WEB-site of House of Outdoor.
Gijs van Ginkel

 

[Maljunulo]

Some seem to have difficulty getting their heads around the difference between objective and subjective.

Some do not even believe that there is a difference, because they are convinced that what they see must be real and correct.

It may not be.

 

[eronald]

I know about standards; I used to be one of the guys who participated in establishing them for color at the ICC, for the print/photo industry. Standards are not in any way objective, they represent decisions made for various reasons by the manufacturers, and usually they need to grandfather in older processes for political reasons. Physical measurements of spectra are objective - however anything to do with color integrates the spectra by means of observer functions which are very much an empirical model of a certain collection of human beings in very controlled situations a long time ago. In this way a “color” measurement does not always bear a direct relationship to what is perceived as seen in uncontrolled environments such as direct sunlight or blue twilight, and as far as I know no revolution in color science has taken place that has updated our very tentative model of color perception and made it complete and objective.

As a scientist I see no reason to call something objective truth regarding perception just because it is an agreed and reproducible metrological process employed in the industry.

There is just one thing we can all agree on IMHO: As Gijs states above, a straight-across transmission spectrum will give neutral color. Because in this case we do not have any assumption about observer functions or white adaptation.
In this sense, any Swaro instrument with a flat-line transmission spectrum should not offend anyone with a color cast.

Edmund