Extending Objective Shrouding - Nikon MHG 10x30 (1 Viewer)

wdc said:

Henry Link appears to be right that some of the glare can be blocked as far as 8-10" from the objective. So, I expect any kind of shroud will reduce some of the glare, but probably not all of it.

For a sea watch or pelagic trip, I wonder if polarizing lenses or simply sunglasses might do the trick.

-Bill

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I agree that all binoculars will show glare in the worst circumstances. Also agree that polarized glasses are absolutely amazing for pelagic birding (with the caveat that you sometimes get weird interactions with some binoculars, presumably due to the coatings in use - ie, my Maui Jim prescription sunglasses combined with my SFs give weird bronzy / purply sheens to the water in some conditions; this doesn't occur with the same sunglasses and my ELs).

As far as these glare / reflection blockers, I doubt you can ever effectively block all the glare, but you might be able to block a good part of it, particularly on binoculars that do not inherently deal well with glare. The question is how long the tubes have to get relative to their diameter in order to exclude more off-angle stray light than the binocular's / telescope's inherent internal design and baffling / darkening can reject. Essentially you are scaling down and implementing smaller versions in parallel of Henry's stated 8-10" shroud length necessity. So you scale down 8-10" length for one long tube to 1" for each of your tiny tubes, and you scale down 42mm objective size to 4mm internal straw diameter and you've achieved the same degree of excluding off-axis light (and I should think with less vignetting to boot). The advantage vs inherent stray light rejection must of course vary from model to model as well. It would be interesting to experiment with this. I also wonder, though, if the black straws are really the best material - a plastic straw is not a matte finish, they tend to be a bit reflective to my layman's eye. Not sure I can think of a better material though, and I doubt anyone is selling thin walled Vantablack tubes that I can find on Amazon

Here's is a guy that found some honeycomb filter's for cheap on Ebay and fit them on his binocular's and a Redneck way of making a honeycomb filter. He painted the straws with flat black spray paint when he was finished. The last video shows how effective the honeycomb filter's are in use.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EjGCBDCfqg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPsrWkMJhsE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9ePlDDnafs

[email protected] said:

Here's is a guy that found some honeycomb filter's for cheap on Ebay and fit them on his binocular's and a Redneck way of making a honeycomb filter. The last video shows how effective the honeycomb filter's are in use.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EjGCBDCfqg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPsrWkMJhsE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9ePlDDnafs

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Interesting product, and good to see in the last one that it actually fits a binocular. However, there's no indication in the video of a difference in contrast, as the camera is an automatic exposure, he doesn't repeat the same view, and even comparing the initial view with the one from the end shows no qualitative difference from what I can see.

The ironic thing is, these videos are all from folks that are concerned about alerting 'the enemy' to their presence with a highlight from their glass. It seems reasonable that it should suppress some of the glare for the user, but no one is even claiming that, as the product wasn't designed with that in mind, apparently.

It could very well be effective! Just hard to tell so far. It wouldn't be the first time that a product developed for military use ended being of value for other non-lethal purposes.

Edit: I have since seen some advertising copy that mentions glare reduction.

-Bill

Hauksen said:

That's approximately 0.25 mm ... just in reach of my consumer-grade 3D printer.

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Inexpensive SLA (liquid resin) printers like the Elegoo Mars can do 50 microns.

Hi,

fazalmajid said:

Inexpensive SLA (liquid resin) printers like the Elegoo Mars can do 50 microns.

Click to expand...

Quite impressive ... I'll have to check it out!

Here's my first attempt at a honeycomb shroud. It still needs some finishing, the honeycomb walls aren't actually as thick as they appear in the picture ... that's just some "flash" at the contact between build surface and the initial layer ("elephant's foot" in 3D printing terms).



Unfinished, the honeycomb does appear as visible shading around the periphery of the view, so the prototype is not a full success.

Regards,

Henning