You want to know a little secret? Free of charge doesn't exist, at least not when a company wants to make some profit. Swaro's service is a good thing but it's paid through the premium price of their products, and at that price, one shouldn't expect free service but rather a non-faulty product.
This is absolutely right and the pics of those Swaros are horrific. Sun block, insect repellent, sweat, and UV light from the Sun are part of life in the open air and products as expensive as Swaros should be capable of resisting their effects.
However having said all of that, just as I argued years ago that the problem with EL focusers could not be all that common, or EL would not have become the best-selling premium bino, so today I conclude that there cannot be that many ELs with armour falling apart for exactly the same reason.
It does make one wonder what caused such awful deterioration of those ELs in the pics, and I am not hinting that the owners might have done 'something wrong' with them.
And what constitutes 'intensive' use of binos? Holding them in your hands for longer than other owners or grabbing them suddenly more frequently than other owners?
About 4 times per year I take my SFs to the west of Scotland for 3 weeks at a time, usually North Uist on the Western Isles, Islay in the Inner Hebrides and Ardnamurchan on the mainland extreme west coast. During visits we usually experience every kind of weather and we don't hide in our cottage, we are out every day and my SFs get hours of sunlight, hours of rain, hours of sea-spray, and because I take macro photos I often lie down on wet ground (often on sheep or goose poo which in some sites is hard to avoid), seaweeds, rocks sometimes toothed with sharp barnacles, and I don't always remember to take off my binos or put them inside my jacket. They get banged against rocks while we explore coasts or stalk otters, occasionally get covered in wind-blown sand (though I always try to get them inside my jacket in these conditions).
This seems like intensive use to me but maybe its not. Point is the SFs don't have a mark on them and the armour is fine. I am not saying that to hint that Zeiss armour is better than Swaro armour and I have already explained I don't believe that the Swaro armour problem can be very common, but what I am doing is asking, what more can you do to use binos more intensively than this that can wreck bino armour?
Lee
