I really had high hopes for the MHG. If I remember rightly it was my first stop at Birdfair that year, and as others have said, the compact size, lowish weight, wide view and handling tick a lot of boxes, but my immediate reaction was disappointment. That was reinforced by a fairly long comparison with the EDG. Some binoculars appear better in some light than others, so I stopped by the stand several more times that day having visited the Kowa, Meopta, Kite and a dozen other booths. It did nothing to improve my opinion.
That was the launch event, and it wouldn't be unusualy for companies to put preproduction samples on the stand so those first impressions might have been misleading. Since that occasion I've tried them on 3 occasions, and done side by sides with the EDG again, Kowa Genesis, Meostar HD, Kite Bonelli 2.0, several Opticrons and a few others. Yes the wide view and ergonomics are nice, but I'd still rate it two or three steps down from the best on centre field performance alone. Perhaps a telling comparison was with three other binoculars I'd rate 8, 9 and 10. There was a medium sized bird sitting on a pole several hundred yards away for about 20 minutes allowing multiple comparisons in pretty constant light conditions. With my elbows on a table, using the MHG it was a fairly well defined, but a fairly uniformly grey silhouette. With the 8 I could make out the neck banding and the 9 and 10 the colour shading of a wood pigeon. On other occasions the differences were more subtle but the ranking remained the same.
Just pointing out that as far as I can see, like Zeiss, Leica and Swarovski before them, Nikon has used centrefield sharpness to discriminate their second tier from their flagship model. Not really a surprise, but disappointing all the same. The MHG has many virtues and I'm sure many will decide it has all the optical preformance they need. Others are bound to disagree. So what's new?
David