I am looking at buying my first pair of reasonable binoculars and looking around the £100-£150 area.
I have read lots of reviews and am particularly interested in the Tom Lock series 2 8x42. Does anyone have any hands on experience with them? Any comparisons with other similar priced binoculars would be helpful.
I wear glasses so need reasonable eye relief.
Thanks,
Tim
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180724
Hi, gsix14:
Welcome to our little band of misfits; the more the merrier! Those who are new to my sick humor ... I mean “humour,” often take me to be a snotball when, in fact, I’m just trying to help ... in my own skewed way, of course.
You asked about a “reasonable” binocular. And while that is a totally rational question, I think you should at least be aware that such words as:
Reasonable,
Quality,
Good,
Great,
Fair,
Affordable,
Inexpensive,
and the like, are ALL SUBJECTIVE TERMS and each member of this—or any other binocular forum—will have their own definition for each. Fortunately, the bell curve will assure you that most of those members will understand your desire and will steer you in a productive direction. Sadly, we have all seen members who start pontificating on what IS or IS NOT this or that when, in fact, they are clueless and just like hearing their heads rattle or to be perceived as an expert in optics. All that glitters is most certainly not gold.
Occasionally, I’ll sell a bino on Eagle Bait, and while seeing where my bino might fit in with others on the market, I will see dozens of ads promoting “VINTAGE” binoculars. These might be a 5x36 Dolland from 1919, a Carl Zeiss, Jena from 1905, or a 6x42 US Navy MK 43 from 1942. More often than not, the seller is using the word “vintage” to describe an out of collimation Jason or TASCO zoom from the early 60s, when the words “old” or “junk” might be technically more accurate. Most of these folks are not intentionally misleading. They have just come to see that affixing “vintage” to the ad verbiage will bring them ~25% closer to the sale they are looking for (preposition at the end and all).
Finally, it might be beneficial for you to know that in a cross-section of 1,000 binoculars coming from Asia—and many binoculars carrying European names are now coming from Asia—you would find almost all are coming from only a handful of OEMs. For example, the Swift Seahawk was also the Fujinon AR (Nautilus), the Bushnell Navigator, and the Simmon’s .... The Adlerbick Fernglasser (made by Carton in Japan) was also the Swift Ultralite, the Celestron Ultima, and ....
I haven’t a clue who Tom Lock is, or anything about products carrying his name. But, I do know that if you have $500 USD and two empty suitcases, you can come back from Tokyo, Japan or Kunming, China as the mogul selling gsix14 binoculars. :cat:
I’ll crawl back into my hole, now. Again, welcome!
Bill