Hi, I'm new here, but thought some might be interested in what I found to be a surprising experience.
I'm in the market for a pair of 8x32-ish roofs in the $400 - $500 range, and have ordered a couple of candidates from B&H for evaluation. First to arrive today was a pair of Minox BL HD 8x33. The packaging boasts that it contains "German. Precision. Optics." (I guess the periods are for emphasis or something.)
Because I didn't get my hands on them til after dark, all my testing so far has been indoors.
They look and feel nice but the two barrels are so horribly vertically misaligned that it seems pointless to evaluate anything else about them. It is impossible to get a fused image looking through both barrels.
At first I couldn't quite believe that brand new bins from a known manufacturer could be quite this bad. I made a target consisting of an 8-inch black circle on white paper with a crosshair (vertical and horizontal line) through the center, stuck it on the wall and viewed from around 15 feet. The lines seemed reasonably sharp but there were TWO horizontal lines offset vertically from each other by around 2.5 inches (measured afterward on the target). Do the trigonometry and this works out to around 0.8 degrees vertical misalignment. Wondering if there was something wrong with *me* I had my wife look through them without describing to her what I was seeing. She reported exactly the same.
Needless to say they'll be going back to B&H tomorrow.
I've seen lots of talk on this forum about sample variation and QC problems in mid-priced bins but this seemed extreme to me. Have others encountered anything like this in brand new buns in this price range (I paid $400 at B&H)?
--Russ
I'm in the market for a pair of 8x32-ish roofs in the $400 - $500 range, and have ordered a couple of candidates from B&H for evaluation. First to arrive today was a pair of Minox BL HD 8x33. The packaging boasts that it contains "German. Precision. Optics." (I guess the periods are for emphasis or something.)
Because I didn't get my hands on them til after dark, all my testing so far has been indoors.
They look and feel nice but the two barrels are so horribly vertically misaligned that it seems pointless to evaluate anything else about them. It is impossible to get a fused image looking through both barrels.
At first I couldn't quite believe that brand new bins from a known manufacturer could be quite this bad. I made a target consisting of an 8-inch black circle on white paper with a crosshair (vertical and horizontal line) through the center, stuck it on the wall and viewed from around 15 feet. The lines seemed reasonably sharp but there were TWO horizontal lines offset vertically from each other by around 2.5 inches (measured afterward on the target). Do the trigonometry and this works out to around 0.8 degrees vertical misalignment. Wondering if there was something wrong with *me* I had my wife look through them without describing to her what I was seeing. She reported exactly the same.
Needless to say they'll be going back to B&H tomorrow.
I've seen lots of talk on this forum about sample variation and QC problems in mid-priced bins but this seemed extreme to me. Have others encountered anything like this in brand new buns in this price range (I paid $400 at B&H)?
--Russ