Not a review per se, but I did have a good look through a demo 8x42 back in September at the Birdfair. Now I had just passed through the Zeiss and then Swarovski areas and had checked out the very impressive 10x50 SV and then the 8x56 SLC, which really blew me away with its stunning view. I have to say that the view that the big exit pupil and large objectives deliver is simply amazing - the best image I saw at the event, better, to my eyes anyway, than the 8x54 HT, and so good that the 8x30 Habicht the Swarovski staff kindly found for me looked almost shockingly dull and unimpressive. The 8x42 Noctivid couldn't match such a view either, but it would probably be unfair to have expected it to, and it was highly impressive in its own right. I must say I didn't think the Noctivid image leapt out at me as being particularly three dimensional, just a less flat field. Colours did seem more saturated than the SF or SV to my eyes - something I liked because although I mainly observe pretty dull birds, I enjoy the vivid green of a rose-ringed parakeet, or the bright yellow patches in a goldfinch's wings, as much as anyone else and our dull British conditions just leach all colour away so that on many days between October and March every bit of colour intensification is worthwhile. The single most striking thing about the Noctivid, though, was that it somehow managed to approximate the big bright view you get from the large-objective binoculars more than any other 8x42 I tried, including the HT, which has Abbe-Konig prisms. I'm not sure quite how this was done, and can believe this effect might not be perceptible to others - maybe the point along the light transmission curve targeted by the binocular's optical design just suited my eyes particularly well - but that's how it seemed to me. In the hand, it was a nice size - small and compact - and gave the impression of being well built (as much as one could discern from handling a presumably hand picked demo model for 10-15 minutes). My main quibble was the position of the focuser which wasn't as instinctive, at least in my hands anyway, as that of the SF, but this is something one could easily adjust to. All in all a really pretty impressive product, with qualities I really liked. The SF 8x42's field of view suits the birding I do better than any of the other alphas, but the Noctivid image is nicer to my eyes.
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