Gijs van Ginkel
Well-known member
Foss, post 80,
And a weight of more than 1700 grams????
Gijs van Ginkel
And a weight of more than 1700 grams????
Gijs van Ginkel
Dalat, right. Panasonic, if you are listening, when you next do the annual update of the travel cameras perhaps you could forget the 'binocular' suggestion, and just call some new 250gm models 'DVZ' (Dual Viewfinder Zoom) instead of 'TZ' (Travel Zoom).
.... fully digital ones, which can be made smaller (no prisms needed) and offer the potential for all sorts of other gimmicks (e.g. the merlin bird ID app built in). In principle, such a binocular could be made already today, all components are there. In the camera world, even Canon and Nikon have now jumped on the mirrorless train, which means that they decided electronic view finders are now good enough to replace optical view finders even in their top line products.
Panasonic, Canon, Sony, Nikon would probably able to do a usable digital binocular very soon. However, they are struggeling hard to keep their foot the fast shrinking camera market, which however is still some dimensions larger than the binoculars market. So it may take a while until they invest into this niche market.
Zeiss and Leica would probably be able to go digital fast too, but I think they are unlikely to do so before being seriously challenged by a newcomer. (a bit like the German car makers, who only now start getting serious about electric cars)
However, whilst digital binoculars might in theory soon be able to satisfy casual episodic use would the currently available batteries be light enough and of sufficient duration to sustain the levelof use that many keen birdwatchers demand? There's also the problem of charging them. I certainly wouldn't want to suffer a 'black-out' at the vital moment. If such instruments were to be developed then I suspect that they'd first be used in a situation where they could be plugged into a power source (e.g. military uses).
If such instruments were to be developed then I suspect that they'd first be used in a situation where they could be plugged into a power source (e.g. military uses).
I think using a big camera would be frustrating amid the kind of birding I usually enjoy most—which is plunging into a complicated environment and trying to make sense of fragmentary, overlapping sensory cues, being taken by surprise, having to strain to figure out 'who' is where in the landscape and what they're doing. But there are obviously a lot of ways to watch birds.
What was said about the triumph of non-optical viewfinders in cameras—that's just fascinating. What advantages, exactly, did the bitter-enders see, or claim to see, in optical viewfinders? Since I would bet that we are more or less certain to repeat, word for word, the precise debate that the community of photographers already went through, only transposed to the register of binoculars!
.. what it would be like to have binoculars that employed a version it to serve up a suggested identification of the bird in your field of view to you in real time. I don't think I'd like it. For one thing it would make it seem as if the act of identification was the end, in both senses, of looking. For another, it would drain away too much of what we get from birding: the experience of figuring something out, feeling our brains form connections and process the evidence of our senses in novel ways, as they call upon every form of memory, auditory and spatial as well as visual.
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That is intriguing. I thought that viewing the two LCD images would be like watching a single TV screen, but through a pair of viewfinder lenses which would be required, as with a single viewfinder, to allow the eyes to relax when looking at screens which were so close to the eyes.A stereo image can be extracted from some current lens designs, which combined with 2 viewfinders, might allow a zoom that stays in collimation..
who are walking around with giant cameras instead of binoculars a
The LCDs would need to be adjustable for IPD but don't begin to understand how '3D' (aka VR) might be realized, even with two camera lenses, or would the effect of 3D be achieved just through using separated camera lenses with two viewfinders (as with 3D TV using coloured glasses) without any need for collimation?
PS I see that collimation would of course be needed for 2 camera lenses!
I now get IDs that I couldn't have got 10 years ago, because there wasn't an affordable and portable camera that would have allowed me to take pictures to study and discuss the ID later on.
So that's great. But now I often face a typical dilemma when an interesting bird appears: should I first take a good look with the binocular and take a pic later, if it stays around; or should I frist make sure I have good record shots and then watch the bird with bins. Sometime I take the wrong decision and I got neither a good look nor a usuable shot. Also, this fiddling around with gear takes away something of the pleasure of just observing the birds.
A device that would merge these two tools, allowing good observation and taking pictures at the same time, would solve this problem. Perhaps.
Thanks for the info Bill, and love new gadgets so hope it does come about....Maybe this product will show up before I make up my mind!
The Victory SF's weren't much of a risk since all the concepts had been thoroughly market-proven for a decade by Swarovski
Peter
Lee, I absolutely defer to you—you know far better than I how much ingenuity, care, and institution-bending has been poured into making new concepts like the SF’s and the Harpia actually come to pass. If I differ it’s really only in what you might think of as wondering where, after all this time, the binocular equivalents of ‘flying cars’ are! I am a little surprised by the strength of my own opinions, seeing them written out, but please don’t read them as flatly dismissive of the wonderful and even, at times, rhapsody-inducing level of refinement we’ve achieved in conventional high-end optics. Frustration is often born of love.