Zeiss 10 x 42 FL, a birding review (1 Viewer)

[henry link]

Which of these has "richer, more saturated" color?

 

[mooreorless]

I am not much for seeing color bias etc. I have this tumbnail on 2 different monitors one a desktop and the other a labtop. For me I "think" the left one, but I keep going back and forth. I am leanging towards the left one. My left eye is different from my right eye.

 

[James Bean]

The left one has richer, more saturated colour; the right one is brighter, more vibrant...

 

[Hermann]

Which of these has "richer, more saturated" color?

The one on the left - even though it's just a bit darker, I think. So it isn't really more saturated, it just looks like it is.

Hermann

 

[henry link]

The 10 actually has good / excellent edge performance at certain positions. If you imagine the edge of the FOV as a clock, then the edge from 8 to 4 is very good. The area at the lower edge of the FOV [4 to 8] has astigmatism that is pronounced when viewing objects past about 400 metres. Less than this and I can still clearly read roadsigns, license plates etc.

The thing about this lower edge astigmatism [if that's what it is] is that I can focus out almost all of it, which I thought was not possible.

Anyway, consider this dead horse fully beaten.....

James,

From my experience there are at least a few possible explanations for asymmetrical astigmatism.

First, if coma is present that will shift the spot of best sharpness away from the center which causes the edge sharpness to be better in the direction of the shift and worse in the other direction. It's not likely that coma would be oriented in the same direction in both barrels of a binocular.

Secondly, any astigmatism in the eye will act to cancel the binocular's astigmatism along one axis, but reinforce the astigmatism on the perpendicular axis.

And finally the movements of the eyeball are not symmetrical as you look around the field and create different amounts of vignetting at the edge as the eye is moved in different directions. More vignetting is actually beneficial for both astigmatism and field curvature. If I work at it I can usually find a pupil position that will cause enough vignetting to correct astigmatism pretty well for one area along the edge.

Rotating the binocular will tell you whether the asymmetry is in the binocular optics or in the interaction between your eye and the binocular optics. If the "good" spot rotates with the binocular it's probably coma or some other optical defect in the binocular. If it stays at the same clock position as the binocular rotates it's either your own eye's astigmatism or somehow related to the asymmetry of the eye's pupil position when looking at the edge in different directions.

Henry

 

[henry link]

The one on the left - even though it's just a bit darker, I think. So it isn't really more saturated, it just looks like it is.

Hermann

Yep, a bit darker, which makes it look more saturated. Both photos are screen shots of a color spectrum chart I found on the internet as it appears on my monitor. The left photo was made at 1/10 sec, the right photo 1/8 sec.

I think photographers are well aware that a little darker image has the effect of enriching the appearance of colors. Whenever I read about "rich" or saturated color in a binocular my first suspicion is that the light transmission may not be so good.

Henry

 

[henry link]

Brock,

I'd like to avoid getting into a "technical debate" about the light transmission of the FL vs SE. That's partly because I've encountered enough contradictory data about the transmission of both that I'm not sure which side of the debate to take. I will say that the Nikon LX-L was not in the same class as the SE in my "photo method" tests. Using that same method the SE (just a little red bias) and FL were quite close overall, but there was an increasingly green color bias in the recent FL's I tested which could be explained by a roll-off in the red.

Henry