I will bet you that Banner Cloud will not make you get rid of your NL 12x42.
There is no comparison between a Swarovski NL and the Banner Cloud optically or build quality wise, no matter what any of the reviews have said. The Banner Cloud is a good $500 MIC binocular. The NL is one of the best binoculars made.
Resolution is the ability to see fine details. Transparency on the other hand has nothing to do with light transmission, contrast or color rendition. Transparency is the ability to see through something without any aberrations or optical artifacts hindering your view. Think of looking through a dirty window and then cleaning it till it is spotless and then looking through it again. By cleaning the window, you made it more transparent. You can now see through it better. An NL or SF has better glass and better coatings than a Banner Cloud, so it is like looking through a cleaner window with no aberrations or reflections.
Sometime compare the coatings on your NL with a less expensive binocular, and you will see how non-reflective they are. Swarovski applies at least 20 different coatings to their glass. The coatings on a Swarovski are beautiful. Compare the coatings on a Zeiss Conquest HD to a Zeiss SF and you will notice a big difference. The coatings on the SF are much better, being much more non-reflective. In the end, you get what you pay for. Below is a picture of a Zeiss SF on the top and a Zeiss Conquest HD on the bottom to show the difference in the quality of the coatings. The SF's coatings are way more non-reflective. From Scopeviews.
www.scopeviews.co.uk
"Perhaps it also explains the exceptional T* coatings: Zeiss’ signature pink, but even darker. And it doesn’t stop there. Shining a bright light into the objectives, there isn’t a single reflection that isn’t dark pink, perhaps the first time I’ve seen such complete coatings. Here, T* means something different from T* on a Conquest HD, whose pink coatings are noticeably more reflective (see below). As an aside, I recently compared the 8x42 Conquest with the 8x42 SF and found a much more subtle difference in their objective coatings."
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