Brock, are you just completely obsessed with 3D? Rhetorical question of course. Why is maximum 3D so important?
To say that everything is Flatland with roofs is clearly shall we say not true. Even my 10x30 have some 3D effect but I do occasionally miss more dof with them as compared with my 8x43.
I don't even think 3D TV caught on although I'm not big on home media news?
Is it impossible for you to look at a photo since it's not 3D enough? Obviously they are all photo's taken somewhere in Flatland.
Glad you're getting on with modernity and the Zeiss. Go on, just admit it. You love them. You can come out here. No-one here would ever ridicule anyone. So easy to lie with a keyboard.
When I had the E2 8x and was out and about I found I just didn't lift them to my eyes as much as I normally would my bins and I wondered why that was and it seemed to me that looking through the E2 didn't actually make much difference to just looking with my eyes (70mm ipd) which seemed to me to somewhat defeat the purpose of having a binocular.
I get a nice 3D view fine without a binocular. If you don't like Flatland through your binocular then just use your eyes for a break. It's kind of your own argument.
Ah, so there is something to my theory about IPD except it is the opposite, you are already have a wide IPD so that gives you a better 3-D effect with roofs than folks with a narrow IPD. 70* is usually the maximum IPD setting on binoculars, though I find they often can go a bit wider than that. It might also explain why the EII gives you an exaggerated 3-D effect.
I'm not "obsessed" with 3-D, I've never seen a 3-D movie although I did like those 3-D slide viewers I had when I was a kid (Viewmaster) that had double slides of the same landscape, which gave the illusion of a 3-D. All my friends liked them. We didn't have electronic games like kids do today to create the illusion of a 3-D, that was about it. That and our Matchbox cars (later slot cars) and toy soldiers. We had to use our imagination to fill in the details. Today, the scenarios all laid out for you in video games in graphic detail, you just have to work the joy stick.
I do
prefer the 3-D view of Porros, and I'm hardly alone in that preference. I think what draws birders to roofs is their (generally) more robust build and waterproofing, and the fact that there are so many more of them to choose from. If manufacturers had favored the development of roofs (Porros can have internal focusers, an early Leica did, and so do reverse Porros and the Leupold Cascades and the Minox BP Porros), we might not be having this dialog and you'd be overdosing on 3-D landscapes and probably using a monocular for birding.
But the industry never got behind Porro WP/FP development. Instead they chose to purse the further development of roofs, which needed improvements just to come on par with cheap Porros in terms of brightness, contrast, and sharpness - phase coatings and 90-layer dielectric coatings - the former took decades to develop and the latter took at least a decade to develop. Then it took a while for that technology to become more affordable and filter down from the top, and so finally, here we are now to the point where Porros were decades ago.
Why did manufacturers favor developing roofs over Porros? Someone once posted some photos of women birders at the turn of the century. They have smaller hands than me, and had more time for leisure pursuits than their husbands, who when they had time went off big game hunting, so the women preferred roofs for their ergonomics despite their inferior image to Porros.
During that time period, birding was the pursuit of the rich leisure class. The burgeoning middle class and the working class were too busy raising their big broods and running their businesses or working in the mines or in the fields to have time to watch birds except when they were outside working. So roofs were developed for rich ladies, or so that story goes.
I proposed another or an additional reason. When Zeiss lost its factories in Jena during WWII, Jena took over making Zeiss Porros, some of which still survive in the form of Doctor Nobilems. If Zeiss West produced the same Porros as Zeiss East, that would not give them much distinction, so they pursued perfecting the roof prism binocular, and with Zeiss being the leader in sports optics, other companies followed the leader.
Whatever is the true story, today we have many, many more roofs to chose from than we do Porros, so someone looking for a bin with the latest coatings (since that more than anything else has been the major progress in binoculars in the past 10-15 years) has either the choice of cheap Porros or multiple price point/quality level roofs. Looking through a 1999 501 8x32 SE and 2010 550 8x32 SE, the leap forward in AR coatings is obvious (to me, at least).
There are some Porro collectors such as Simon S, but I think even he would admit that as nice and bright as the view is through old Porros, the image lacks the contrast and color saturation of modern roofs.
I don't get eye fatigue with roofs the way you do with the super 3-D effect EII, so I don't need to take a rest from them, but what I do need to take a rest from is super fast focusers (less than 1/2 turn from close focus to infinity). The Terra ED has such a focuser, and it does fatigue my eyes because it plays havoc with my focus accommodation, which is not as good as it used to be when I was younger. So, no, I can't admit that I love them, I don't, but I do like them. While they are acceptably sharp, they lack the fine feather detail of the SE and EII. I'm spoiled.
I might feel differently about the Conquest HD. It led the pack in terms of resolution in the second tier in the Porter's (birdwatching.com) comparative test. Provided the focus isn't too fast, I might find contentment with a Conquest, but I'd still rather have a black body 8x30 EII if I could only afford one or the other.
Yes, of course, Flatland, a 2-dimensional world where 2-dimenenstial creatures live, is an exaggeration, but roofs, and midsized roofs in particular, do give me more of an impression of a flattened landscape, more like a painting than what I see with my eyes.
Case in point, looking at rows of trees one in back of the other, with a Porro I can see the rows separated clearly, which gives a similar view that I see with my eyes. Look at the same landscape with the 8x32 LX and now the rows seem closer together, with little space between them, as if they had suddenly moved closer toward me (spooky). Next I thought they'd be throwing apples at me.
The Flatland analogy was to show how differently we perceive the same landscape, but I would contend that you are the exception to the rule rather than me. Aside from Henry and a few others, there haven't been many BF members reporting that the view through roofs seems more natural than the view through Porros. I would concede that to be true at close focus where the wider separated barrels can cause your eyes to cross, but most Porros don't have really close focus like roofs. In fact, the closest focusing Porro I've owned has been the 8x30 EII @ 7 ft, and I don't notice as much barrel overlap with the EII at 7 ft. as I do with the SE at its close focus of 10 ft. Some expert gave an explanation for this but I don't remember what it was.
Once the humidity gets below 90%, I will resume my exploration of Quasi-Flatland.
Brock
