Steve, this two pronged approach seems entirely logical to me. Such a strategy gives excellent market coverage and consumer choice to Swarovski with the SLC and SV. Zeiss has:-
Minimal glass lenses and a more natural field curvature, A-K prisms, HT & FL glass for maximal brightness on one hand with the HT, and
Multiple lens ocular and wide flat field with S-P prisms of the SF on the other.
What is strange is that they swallowed their own marketing fluff so completely :eat: that they:-
Abandoned the successful FRP chassis material of the FL series in favour of making the HT a brick, and
Hamstrung the SF from being all that it could be by not including HT glass for added brightness and a more neutral colour balance .....
In seeking to differentiate product so completely to suit the marketing department agenda, the lunatics took over the asylum.
If the HT is gone for good, then isn't that a decades long history of that basic design lineage down the gurgler ?!
Perhaps Zeiss will finally see the "light" and supercede it with the same optical train in a more advanced lightweight material model :cat:
Chosun :gh: