Enjoying more my 804R Mark II Audubons (1 Viewer)

Yes.

Steve, I suspect Nicolas is rather unassuming and modest, and with that I hope he makes mine better overall as he did yours. The fact that he will disassemble them completely leads me to believe that that will be the result. I like your encouraging report.

Ed, I am one of those "fans" of a large apparent field. I got used to it with the 804R's. Anything smaller can be disappointing, and have set an arbitrary lower limit of 60 degrees for any future binocular purchase. 60 is the AFOV of my TeleVue Radian eyepieces used in my telescopes. Then I have three Panoptic eyepieces of 68 degrees. Their Nagler line of eyepieces, with a 82 degree field, have the "spacewalk" quality of view -- just as you refer to the term "presence." Now they have the Ethos line with 100 degrees. OK, now we're getting too wide! The point is, I got tired of looking through the comparatively narrow peepholes of my older eyepieces.

A few days ago I thought of looking for a nice high-quality compact roof, so I went looking through listings of binoculars, all roofs, and see such narrow fields in the specs. Some of them are in the 45 degree area. It's disappointing.

Howard

Howard,

"Presence," is the holy grail of helmet mounted aircraft displays, aeronautical flight simulators, virtual-reality games, and NASA's telepresence systems used with unmanned planetary rovers. It's also likely to become the ultimate criterion for stereo TV in the future.

Those systems are designed to enhance or emulate normal vision, but viewing with binoculars serves to demonstrate that even a magnified scene can be engineered to produce the sensation of being in the scene. My guesstimate is that 70° AFOV is needed to produce the sensation consistently. The Linet's very wide apparent field of 96° improves on that and probably comes close to producing the maximum effect possible.

One thing worth mentioning is that for extremely wide apparent fields the field-stop edge is less evident. This mimics normal vision and I think facilitates the sensation of presence. I also suspect that for terrestrial viewing the field curvature of ultra-wide binoculars should be tuned to the curvature of the retina.

Ed