Alexis Powell
Natural history enthusiast
Rico70,
At the risk of giving this thread insanely more attention than it probably deserves, I'm going to inquire into a few points in your original treatise that didn't come up in our later exchange, but that contributed to my interest in your claims in the first place.
In spite of your further explanation (beyond what I have quoted above) and citation, I can't understand how what you are claiming here could be true, because the real world usually isn't composed of details that differ in magnitude from each other to any regular degree (i.e. resolvable detail of the world is "analog", not "digital", not quantized). Consequently, assuming that a binocular (or any supplementary lens) can resolve finer detail than the eye, _any_ increase in magnification should bring more details beyond the threshold of the eye's resolving ability, and consequently allow them to be perceptible.
I will grant you that when it comes to seeing impressively more detail by eye through optics, or capturing it with a digital camera, 3x the magnification or megapixels, is, in my experience, a nice increment. Going from two eyes to one eye with a 5x monocular is a nice boost. From eyes to 7x or 8x bins is a giant leap. From 8x bins to 20x scope is a nice step, and 8x bins to 30x scope is a nice big step. By contrast, the jumps from 7x to 8x, or 8x to 10x, or 30x to 60x are generally unsatisfying to me, even though each of them certainly yields more detail. Again, these are just personal preferences, and these preferences and experiences do nothing to challenge my observation of the continuous increase in detail-revealing performance that comes with increased magnification (provided the instrument has higher resolving power than the eye).
Again, you seem to think that the details of the world are somehow quantized. Even if the detection system is digital or somehow organically quantized, the world being observed (usually) _isn't_, nor is the possible level of magnification used to deliver the light to that detection system. Consequently, all intermediate levels of detail exist and are available to be resolved by each tiny increment in magnification.
What????? _You_ can't see (much) more through binoculars than _you_ can see with your naked eyes until you reach 10x magnification?! You can't be serious! You can't have made this statement based on accurate appraisal of your own observational experience. Unless you have a quantized retina and are living a world of quantized levels of detail, what you have said here cannot be true.
I agree that it would be a mistake to attribute to magnification the blur that is a result of the eye/brain's inability to process a rapidly moving (i.e. shaking) image. Magnification does not cause shaking blur, it just allows the shaking to be seen as blur since fine details (relative to the overall structure in view) that exist in the world and that are resolved within the (perceptibly) shaking image are moving too fast to be reliably seen.
Agreed that users who are able to hold their bins more steady than the average person, or who somehow have above average ability to visually process a moving image, will be able to make good use of higher than average binocular magnifications.
Agreed that by reducing magnification until shaking is not bothersome that one is placing a strong limit on magnification, and thus the amount of detail that the binoculars will be able to deliver to the eye above its own unaided abilities. As an aside, I also grant that this cap on magnification, traditionally around 7-10x, is far below the 25-40x magnifications that a reasonably-sized (hand-holdable) telescope or binocular can easily be made to achieve and deliver (with adequate brightness, eye-relief) very comfortably to the eye, whether the eye/brain can make sense of the image or not.
Agreed that users differ quite a bit in their abilities to hold binoculars steady or to make visual sense of a moving image. I don't think it is true that we on BirdForum accept the ~10x limit via dogma--I think most of us _have_ tried to hand-hold higher magnifications and have failed. I also think that members of the general public (i.e. those who are not on BirdForum), when purchasing binoculars, also often try higher powers. In my experience, most naive buyers want binoculars to work like what they see portrayed in movies (often ~100x!), so they are extremely disappointed with 8x or 10x when they try those powers. They immediately want much higher magnifications, which they quickly discover that they cannot hand-hold. This soon leads to interest in spotting scopes, which they are disappointed to find are bulky and require tripods, are hard to use, are expensive, and are _still_ not as powerful as what they were wanting.
OK, this is the bit that you really need to explain more. Moreover, you need to explain how to employ or develop the techniques that you claim to use.
The way that I have understood this passage is as follows. You are arguing that, for two reasons, that details that are only just resolved by the eye in a 10x view will be easier to perceive when they are instead magnified 100x, even when hand-held. The first reason [with which I agree] is that at 100x, those details will now be very comfortably within the eye's ability to resolve them (and indeed, many more finer details will be available than at 10x). The second reason is that, since at 100x the rapid tiny shaking movements due to hand-holding will become translated into apparently long motions [To that, I agree], that you think [And here, I disagree] will make seeing the details easier because they can now be tracked rather than being lost in too fine and too rapid motion.
I don't see how such tracking, either by the eye as a whole or through retinal processing, would be facilitated by magnification. Although the proportional-to-the-overall-scene amount of motion stays the same with magnification (especially if there is, as in this thought example, no limit on FOV), with magnification both the apparent amount of motion and the apparent _speed_ of the motion increase. In my experience, the speed of that motion quickly increases with magnification beyond the limits of my retinal ganglia and brain's ability to process it, and so the detail is lost in the perceptual phenomenon that we all know as motion blur.
I might agree that _if_ I were able to look at the same flat scene through a 100x binocular that had the same true FOV as a 10x binocular, both very rapidly shaking in a randomized but limited and held on target (on average) way, that (I imagine--I haven't really thought this through fully) that I might be able to see more details, because (again, I imagine that) the 100x scene would look much the same as the 10x view, just larger. What are perceived as points of light composing the 10x perceived view will now be perceived as motion-blurred discs of light composing the 100x perceived view. Some details not visible in the 10x view would become visible in the 100x view as they would be perceived as small motion-blurred discs of light within the larger discs of light that correspond to what were points in the 10x view. Again, I'm not sure I've thought this through correctly, so I don't trust my imagination. Regardless, none of what I have described in this paragraph matches your descriptions, nor does it, in my experience, match the specifications of available binoculars, the FOV limits of my eyes, or the movement/vibration characteristics of my hand-held views. Consequently, it doesn't for me have practical application. But I'd be happy to be convinced otherwise!
--AP
At the risk of giving this thread insanely more attention than it probably deserves, I'm going to inquire into a few points in your original treatise that didn't come up in our later exchange, but that contributed to my interest in your claims in the first place.
In spite of your further explanation (beyond what I have quoted above) and citation, I can't understand how what you are claiming here could be true, because the real world usually isn't composed of details that differ in magnitude from each other to any regular degree (i.e. resolvable detail of the world is "analog", not "digital", not quantized). Consequently, assuming that a binocular (or any supplementary lens) can resolve finer detail than the eye, _any_ increase in magnification should bring more details beyond the threshold of the eye's resolving ability, and consequently allow them to be perceptible.
I will grant you that when it comes to seeing impressively more detail by eye through optics, or capturing it with a digital camera, 3x the magnification or megapixels, is, in my experience, a nice increment. Going from two eyes to one eye with a 5x monocular is a nice boost. From eyes to 7x or 8x bins is a giant leap. From 8x bins to 20x scope is a nice step, and 8x bins to 30x scope is a nice big step. By contrast, the jumps from 7x to 8x, or 8x to 10x, or 30x to 60x are generally unsatisfying to me, even though each of them certainly yields more detail. Again, these are just personal preferences, and these preferences and experiences do nothing to challenge my observation of the continuous increase in detail-revealing performance that comes with increased magnification (provided the instrument has higher resolving power than the eye).
Again, you seem to think that the details of the world are somehow quantized. Even if the detection system is digital or somehow organically quantized, the world being observed (usually) _isn't_, nor is the possible level of magnification used to deliver the light to that detection system. Consequently, all intermediate levels of detail exist and are available to be resolved by each tiny increment in magnification.
What????? _You_ can't see (much) more through binoculars than _you_ can see with your naked eyes until you reach 10x magnification?! You can't be serious! You can't have made this statement based on accurate appraisal of your own observational experience. Unless you have a quantized retina and are living a world of quantized levels of detail, what you have said here cannot be true.
I agree that it would be a mistake to attribute to magnification the blur that is a result of the eye/brain's inability to process a rapidly moving (i.e. shaking) image. Magnification does not cause shaking blur, it just allows the shaking to be seen as blur since fine details (relative to the overall structure in view) that exist in the world and that are resolved within the (perceptibly) shaking image are moving too fast to be reliably seen.
Agreed that users who are able to hold their bins more steady than the average person, or who somehow have above average ability to visually process a moving image, will be able to make good use of higher than average binocular magnifications.
Agreed that by reducing magnification until shaking is not bothersome that one is placing a strong limit on magnification, and thus the amount of detail that the binoculars will be able to deliver to the eye above its own unaided abilities. As an aside, I also grant that this cap on magnification, traditionally around 7-10x, is far below the 25-40x magnifications that a reasonably-sized (hand-holdable) telescope or binocular can easily be made to achieve and deliver (with adequate brightness, eye-relief) very comfortably to the eye, whether the eye/brain can make sense of the image or not.
Agreed that users differ quite a bit in their abilities to hold binoculars steady or to make visual sense of a moving image. I don't think it is true that we on BirdForum accept the ~10x limit via dogma--I think most of us _have_ tried to hand-hold higher magnifications and have failed. I also think that members of the general public (i.e. those who are not on BirdForum), when purchasing binoculars, also often try higher powers. In my experience, most naive buyers want binoculars to work like what they see portrayed in movies (often ~100x!), so they are extremely disappointed with 8x or 10x when they try those powers. They immediately want much higher magnifications, which they quickly discover that they cannot hand-hold. This soon leads to interest in spotting scopes, which they are disappointed to find are bulky and require tripods, are hard to use, are expensive, and are _still_ not as powerful as what they were wanting.
OK, this is the bit that you really need to explain more. Moreover, you need to explain how to employ or develop the techniques that you claim to use.
The way that I have understood this passage is as follows. You are arguing that, for two reasons, that details that are only just resolved by the eye in a 10x view will be easier to perceive when they are instead magnified 100x, even when hand-held. The first reason [with which I agree] is that at 100x, those details will now be very comfortably within the eye's ability to resolve them (and indeed, many more finer details will be available than at 10x). The second reason is that, since at 100x the rapid tiny shaking movements due to hand-holding will become translated into apparently long motions [To that, I agree], that you think [And here, I disagree] will make seeing the details easier because they can now be tracked rather than being lost in too fine and too rapid motion.
I don't see how such tracking, either by the eye as a whole or through retinal processing, would be facilitated by magnification. Although the proportional-to-the-overall-scene amount of motion stays the same with magnification (especially if there is, as in this thought example, no limit on FOV), with magnification both the apparent amount of motion and the apparent _speed_ of the motion increase. In my experience, the speed of that motion quickly increases with magnification beyond the limits of my retinal ganglia and brain's ability to process it, and so the detail is lost in the perceptual phenomenon that we all know as motion blur.
I might agree that _if_ I were able to look at the same flat scene through a 100x binocular that had the same true FOV as a 10x binocular, both very rapidly shaking in a randomized but limited and held on target (on average) way, that (I imagine--I haven't really thought this through fully) that I might be able to see more details, because (again, I imagine that) the 100x scene would look much the same as the 10x view, just larger. What are perceived as points of light composing the 10x perceived view will now be perceived as motion-blurred discs of light composing the 100x perceived view. Some details not visible in the 10x view would become visible in the 100x view as they would be perceived as small motion-blurred discs of light within the larger discs of light that correspond to what were points in the 10x view. Again, I'm not sure I've thought this through correctly, so I don't trust my imagination. Regardless, none of what I have described in this paragraph matches your descriptions, nor does it, in my experience, match the specifications of available binoculars, the FOV limits of my eyes, or the movement/vibration characteristics of my hand-held views. Consequently, it doesn't for me have practical application. But I'd be happy to be convinced otherwise!
--AP
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) who have always supported your opposite.
