Which is why I said: "Weight? Yes. Ergonomics? Yes. Style? Maybe. But optical performance? Very rarely."
I covered my bases. :cat:
Bill
Bill,
The view through an instrument is a "percept". It is not a physical "thing" or even an imaginary "concept", it is an evoked reaction to the viewing of the scene through the instrument.
As such, equipment that mediates the view needs to be evaluated not only with respect to certain physical measures of transmitted scene values, but above all according to how people describe their perception.
One of the factors that color your own perspective on these issues is your training in the military, which is an organisation that expects its members to suck it up and get on with the job. The common soldier doesn't choose a color of uniform, cuisine of your food, or I guess binoculars whenin the military - people who are assumed to be smart have made the purchasing decision of what food a soldier should eat to be prepared and have stamina, what color a uniform should be so as not to stand out in the desert or in the snow, and what image a scope or observer's instrument should present to be used for a task.
Let me restate that: the military deliberately demands every soldier abstract away the pleasurability of the user experience, in the same way that the military demands she abstract away any considerations or second thoughts about the morality of the use of force.
In civilian life, people are expected to make choices all the time. The choice of food, the choice of clothes, whether or not they should break their neighbour's nose, it is all up to them. They can decide to eat food they like or stuff which makes them feel like vomiting. And they are also at liberty to choose their binoculars.
Which is why civilians start thinking about "do I like this pair" and start describing the percept, using very vague terms to describe and communicate psychophysical effects that are evoked by the use of the instrument rather than the objective measures that can be derived by direct inspection of the instrument.
BTW, in color, a subject I am familiar with, the perceptions of trained observers are often considered more important and even precise than any measurements. I say this as an ex-member of the ICC, the International Color Consortium which is one of the standards bodies for photo and printing color.
The task of a standards making body is very often to try and translate word descriptions into items which can be checked, assessed and quantified. But one should not assume that when a quality has not been (yet) been quantified this means that it has been deemed unimportant. An example in photography is texture loss, a digital photography issue which impacts skin tone in portraits of people, which is mathematically hard to define but very annoying as one can see from cellphone photos that show "plastic skin".
I was in a park yesterday and saw a bird around the edge of the pond. I used my binoculars and looked for features. I noted the strange green legs, an orange beak with a yellow end and dark plumage with a white band at the tail. It walked around with a ducking weaving long-legged stride, then got into the water and swam like a duck, maybe twenty yards away. I got home and looked it up, of course it's a common gallinule. My experience stayed in the mind better because I like my binoculars, their use is effortless, and so I have a good mental image of what happened, no fiddling or interpreting the color even though it was already late in the day. The instrument's presentation and qualia were woven into the perception I had then and into the memory that is with me now.
Edmund
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