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Leica Ultravid 8x20 BR Vs. Zeiss Victory 8x20 B T* (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter Dialyt
- Start date
elkcub
Silicon Valley, California
At this point in my life the only hi-end 8x20 I can tolerate is the Leica. Why? Because it has 16mm eye relief and just manages to work with my glasses. The others are inadequate and should be upgraded:
Swaro SLC 13mm
Zeiss Victory 14mm
Nikon LXL 15mm
Ed
Kevin Conville
yardbirder
I agree, but for different reasons. The Leicas are the only ones that function smoothly (IMO) and have their controls in the right place. Though not a big fan of minis generally, the only ones I'd buy would be Ultravids.
spiralcoil
Well-known member
Indeed, the current Leica pocket sized binoculars are the very best ones, beside small, it is actually practically useful and in high quality optically as well mechanically.
The 8x20 is excellent, if you need a pocket-sized bino, it is the one to have.
The 8x20 is excellent, if you need a pocket-sized bino, it is the one to have.
Tvc15_2000
Well-known member
I have owned both in the 10X25 flavor.
The Z’s are very nice. Lightweight composite yet rock stable rugged construction. I had no problem with the ergonomics, focusing in cold weather, knob size, configuration waterproofness etc. Once you get used to the "dare to be different" clam shell design it is as good as any other design. I share none of the concerns I have read in posts.
Zeiss makes a fine product. I liked the nylon Velcro case so much I purchased them for all my 10X25s. The last pair of Zs I tried came with an animal hide case. I preferred the nylon because I love foul weather. I liked the Zs so much I tried them again last year to see if they made any changes that might entice me. But they had not and I returned them.
The color, sharpness, ergonomics and everything else was great. But I had an issue with flare or ghosting on difficult back lit views (and only on difficult back lit views). To my eyes the Leica’s perform better (but not perfect) for that condition.
The Leica is still my favorite (for several years). It looks sort of frail in comparison. But its it’s a tough little binocular and up for daily use, in all conditions, without complaints. It travels places where I cant take the the other anvils. The nylon cases that came with mine were so snug they spent a month on a shoe stretcher to get them to relax. While the case is useable and uses a silent closure clip rather than noisy Velcro I now use the Zeiss nylon case. Both my 10X25 Ultravids were assembled in Portugal and ooze German discipline in, quality control, construction, engineering and optical performance. No complaints, especially considering the intent of the design, and the limitations that imposes. Smaller, cheaper, better. You can only pick 2.
I only had a look at a 2008 Swaro in a store reading bar codes off boxes. It did not impress me enough to want to take it into the field for more testing. But many other people prefer the Swaro.
As a tribe, I have found nothing better than the Leica Ultravid, Nikon LXL and Zeiss Conquest *T. All are lightweight delights worth checking out in the field. None are bad. Each has a slight advantage in a “condition”.
A 10X25 is not a 10X32 or a 10X42 etc. Comparisons between those 3 would be comparing pineapples to meatballs, but many attempt it.
Watch out for the Restraint bias, Decoy effect, Denomination effect, Bandwagon effect and Confirmation bias, and any others that may cloud your decision. This list should make it easier to filter out any biases. Once you have removed all these biases from the decision you be ready to purchase! (for anyone who takes this task seriously - its a joke).
• Ambiguity effect – the tendency to avoid options for which missing information makes the probability seem "unknown."[6]
• Anchoring – the tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor," on a past reference or on one trait or piece of information when making decisions (also called "insufficient adjustment").
• Attentional Bias – the tendency of emotionally dominant stimuli in one's environment to preferentially draw and hold attention and to neglect relevant data when making judgments of a correlation or association.
• Availability heuristic – estimating what is more likely by what is more available in memory, which is biased toward vivid, unusual, or emotionally charged examples.
• Availability cascade – a self-reinforcing process in which a collective belief gains more and more plausibility through its increasing repetition in public discourse (or "repeat something long enough and it will become true").
• Backfire effect – when people react to disconfirming evidence by strengthening their beliefs.[7]
• Bandwagon effect – the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink and herd behavior.
• Base rate neglect or Base rate fallacy – the tendency to base judgments on specifics, ignoring general statistical information.[8]
• Belief bias – an effect where someone's evaluation of the logical strength of an argument is biased by the believability of the conclusion.[9]
• Bias blind spot – the tendency to see oneself as less biased than other people, or to be able to identify more cognitive biases in others than in oneself.[10]
• Choice-supportive bias – the tendency to remember one's choices as better than they actually were.[11]
• Clustering illusion – the tendency to under-expect runs, streaks or clusters in small samples of random data
• Confirmation bias – the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.[12]
• Congruence bias – the tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing, in contrast to tests of possible alternative hypotheses.
• Conjunction fallacy – the tendency to assume that specific conditions are more probable than general ones.[13]
• Conservatism or Regressive Bias – tendency to underestimate high values and high likelihoods/probabilities/frequencies and overestimate low ones. Based on the observed evidence, estimates are not extreme enough[5][14][15]
• Conservatism (Bayesian) – the tendency to belief update insufficiently but predictably as a result of new evidence (estimates of conditional probabilities are conservative)[5][16][17]
• Contrast effect – the enhancement or diminishing of a weight or other measurement when compared with a recently observed contrasting object.[18]
• Curse of knowledge – when better-informed people lose the ability to understand lesser-informed people
• Decoy effect – preferences change when there is a third option that is asymmetrically dominated
• Denomination effect – the tendency to spend more money when it is denominated in small amounts (e.g. coins) rather than large amounts (e.g. bills).[19]
• Distinction bias – the tendency to view two options as more dissimilar when evaluating them simultaneously than when evaluating them separately.[20]
• Duration neglect – the neglect of the duration of an episode in determining its value
• Empathy gap – the tendency to underestimate the influence or strength of feelings, in either oneself or others.
• Endowment effect – the fact that people often demand much more to give up an object than they would be willing to pay to acquire it.[21]
• Essentialism – categorizing people and things according to their essential nature, in spite of variations.[22]
• Exaggerated expectation – based on the estimates, real-world evidence turns out to be less extreme than our expectations (conditionally inverse of the conservatism bias).[5][23]
• Experimenter's or Expectation bias – the tendency for experimenters to believe, certify, and publish data that agree with their expectations for the outcome of an experiment, and to disbelieve, discard, or downgrade the corresponding weightings for data that appear to conflict with those expectations.[24]
• Functional fixedness - limits a person to using an object only in the way it is traditionally used
• Focusing effect – the tendency to place too much importance on one aspect of an event; causes error in accurately predicting the utility of a future outcome.[25]
• Framing effect – drawing different conclusions from the same information, depending on how that information is presented.
• Frequency illusion – the illusion in which a word, a name or other thing that has recently come to one's attention suddenly appears "everywhere" with improbable frequency (see also recency illusion). Sometimes called "The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon".
• Gambler's fallacy – the tendency to think that future probabilities are altered by past events, when in reality they are unchanged. Results from an erroneous conceptualization of the Law of large numbers. For example, "I've flipped heads with this coin five times consecutively, so the chance of tails coming out on the sixth flip is much greater than heads."
• Hard-easy effect – Based on a specific level of task difficulty, the confidence in judgments is too conservative and not extreme enough[5][26][27][28]
• Hindsight bias – sometimes called the "I-knew-it-all-along" effect, the tendency to see past events as being predictable[29] at the time those events happened.(sometimes phrased as "Hindsight is 20/20")
• Hostile media effect – the tendency to see a media report as being biased due to one's own strong partisan views.
• Hyperbolic discounting – the tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs, where the tendency increases the closer to the present both payoffs are.[30]
• Illusion of control – the tendency to overestimate one's degree of influence over other external events.[31]
• Illusion of validity – when consistent but predictively weak data leads to confident predictions
• Illusory correlation – inaccurately perceiving a relationship between two unrelated events.[32][33]
• Impact bias – the tendency to overestimate the length or the intensity of the impact of future feeling states.[34]
• Information bias – the tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action.[35]
• Insensitivity to sample size – the tendency to under-expect variation in small samples
• Irrational escalation – the phenomenon where people justify increased investment in a decision, based on the cumulative prior investment, despite new evidence suggesting that the decision was probably wrong.
• Jealousy bias – a tendency to have persistent paranoid thoughts about a "mate poacher" and/or personal inadequacies in comparison to someone else. The irrational thoughts disrupt environments and routines because the bias creates compulsions.[36]
• Just-world hypothesis – the tendency for people to want to believe that the world is fundamentally just, causing them to rationalize an otherwise inexplicable injustice as deserved by the victim(s).
• Knowledge bias – the tendency of people to choose the option they know best rather than the best option.
• Less-is-better effect – a preference reversal where a dominated smaller set is preferred to a larger set
• Loss aversion – "the disutility of giving up an object is greater than the utility associated with acquiring it".[37] (see also Sunk cost effects and endowment effect).
• Mere exposure effect – the tendency to express undue liking for things merely because of familiarity with them.[38]
• Money illusion – the tendency to concentrate on the nominal (face value) of money rather than its value in terms of purchasing power.[39]
• Moral credential effect – the tendency of a track record of non-prejudice to increase subsequent prejudice.
• Negativity bias – the tendency to pay more attention and give more weight to negative than positive experiences or other kinds of information.
• Neglect of probability – the tendency to completely disregard probability when making a decision under uncertainty.[40]
• Normalcy bias – the refusal to plan for, or react to, a disaster which has never happened before.
• Observer-expectancy effect – when a researcher expects a given result and therefore unconsciously manipulates an experiment or misinterprets data in order to find it (see also subject-expectancy effect).
• Omission bias – the tendency to judge harmful actions as worse, or less moral, than equally harmful omissions (inactions).[41]
• Optimism bias – the tendency to be over-optimistic, overestimating favorable and pleasing outcomes (see also wishful thinking, valence effect, positive outcome bias).[42][43]
• Ostrich effect – ignoring an obvious (negative) situation.
• Outcome bias – the tendency to judge a decision by its eventual outcome instead of based on the quality of the decision at the time it was made.
• Overconfidence effect – excessive confidence in one's own answers to questions. For example, for certain types of questions, answers that people rate as "99% certain" turn out to be wrong 40% of the time.[5][44][45][46]
• Pareidolia – a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) is perceived as significant, e.g., seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon, and hearing non-existent hidden messages on records played in reverse.
• Pessimism bias – the tendency for some people, especially those suffering from depression, to overestimate the likelihood of negative things happening to them.
• Planning fallacy – the tendency to underestimate task-completion times.[34]
• Post-purchase rationalization – the tendency to persuade oneself through rational argument that a purchase was a good value.
• Pro-innovation bias – the tendency to reflect a personal bias towards an invention/innovation, while often failing to identify limitations and weaknesses or address the possibility of failure.
• Pseudocertainty effect – the tendency to make risk-averse choices if the expected outcome is positive, but make risk-seeking choices to avoid negative outcomes.[47]
• Reactance – the urge to do the opposite of what someone wants you to do out of a need to resist a perceived attempt to constrain your freedom of choice (see also Reverse psychology).
• Reactive devaluation – devaluing proposals that are no longer hypothetical or purportedly originated with an adversary
• Recency bias – a cognitive bias that results from disproportionate salience of recent stimuli or observations – the tendency to weigh recent events more than earlier events (see also peak-end rule, recency effect).
• Recency illusion – the illusion that a phenomenon, typically a word or language usage, that one has just begun to notice is a recent innovation (see also frequency illusion).
• Restraint bias – the tendency to overestimate one's ability to show restraint in the face of temptation.
• Rhyme as reason effect – rhyming statements are perceived as more truthful.
• Selective perception – the tendency for expectations to affect perception.
• Semmelweis reflex – the tendency to reject new evidence that contradicts a paradigm.[48]
• Social comparison bias – the tendency, when making hiring decisions, to favour potential candidates who don't compete with one's own particular strengths.[49]
• Social desirability bias - the tendency to over-report socially desirable characteristics or behaviours and under-report socially undesirable characteristics or behaviours.[50]
• Status quo bias – the tendency to like things to stay relatively the same (see also loss aversion, endowment effect, and system justification).[51][52]
• Stereotyping – expecting a member of a group to have certain characteristics without having actual information about that individual.
• Subadditivity effect – the tendency to estimate that the likelihood of an event is less than the sum of its (more than two) mutually exclusive components.[53]
• Subjective validation – perception that something is true if a subject's belief demands it to be true. Also assigns perceived connections between coincidences.
• Time-saving bias – underestimations of the time that could be saved (or lost) when increasing (or decreasing) from a relatively low speed and overestimations of the time that could be saved (or lost) when increasing (or decreasing) from a relatively high speed.
• Unit bias – the tendency to want to finish a given unit of a task or an item. Strong effects on the consumption of food in particular.[54]
• Well travelled road effect – underestimation of the duration taken to traverse oft-traveled routes and over-estimate the duration taken to traverse less familiar routes.
• Zero-risk bias – preference for reducing a small risk to zero over a greater reduction in a larger risk.
The Z’s are very nice. Lightweight composite yet rock stable rugged construction. I had no problem with the ergonomics, focusing in cold weather, knob size, configuration waterproofness etc. Once you get used to the "dare to be different" clam shell design it is as good as any other design. I share none of the concerns I have read in posts.
Zeiss makes a fine product. I liked the nylon Velcro case so much I purchased them for all my 10X25s. The last pair of Zs I tried came with an animal hide case. I preferred the nylon because I love foul weather. I liked the Zs so much I tried them again last year to see if they made any changes that might entice me. But they had not and I returned them.
The color, sharpness, ergonomics and everything else was great. But I had an issue with flare or ghosting on difficult back lit views (and only on difficult back lit views). To my eyes the Leica’s perform better (but not perfect) for that condition.
The Leica is still my favorite (for several years). It looks sort of frail in comparison. But its it’s a tough little binocular and up for daily use, in all conditions, without complaints. It travels places where I cant take the the other anvils. The nylon cases that came with mine were so snug they spent a month on a shoe stretcher to get them to relax. While the case is useable and uses a silent closure clip rather than noisy Velcro I now use the Zeiss nylon case. Both my 10X25 Ultravids were assembled in Portugal and ooze German discipline in, quality control, construction, engineering and optical performance. No complaints, especially considering the intent of the design, and the limitations that imposes. Smaller, cheaper, better. You can only pick 2.
I only had a look at a 2008 Swaro in a store reading bar codes off boxes. It did not impress me enough to want to take it into the field for more testing. But many other people prefer the Swaro.
As a tribe, I have found nothing better than the Leica Ultravid, Nikon LXL and Zeiss Conquest *T. All are lightweight delights worth checking out in the field. None are bad. Each has a slight advantage in a “condition”.
A 10X25 is not a 10X32 or a 10X42 etc. Comparisons between those 3 would be comparing pineapples to meatballs, but many attempt it.
Watch out for the Restraint bias, Decoy effect, Denomination effect, Bandwagon effect and Confirmation bias, and any others that may cloud your decision. This list should make it easier to filter out any biases. Once you have removed all these biases from the decision you be ready to purchase! (for anyone who takes this task seriously - its a joke).
• Ambiguity effect – the tendency to avoid options for which missing information makes the probability seem "unknown."[6]
• Anchoring – the tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor," on a past reference or on one trait or piece of information when making decisions (also called "insufficient adjustment").
• Attentional Bias – the tendency of emotionally dominant stimuli in one's environment to preferentially draw and hold attention and to neglect relevant data when making judgments of a correlation or association.
• Availability heuristic – estimating what is more likely by what is more available in memory, which is biased toward vivid, unusual, or emotionally charged examples.
• Availability cascade – a self-reinforcing process in which a collective belief gains more and more plausibility through its increasing repetition in public discourse (or "repeat something long enough and it will become true").
• Backfire effect – when people react to disconfirming evidence by strengthening their beliefs.[7]
• Bandwagon effect – the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink and herd behavior.
• Base rate neglect or Base rate fallacy – the tendency to base judgments on specifics, ignoring general statistical information.[8]
• Belief bias – an effect where someone's evaluation of the logical strength of an argument is biased by the believability of the conclusion.[9]
• Bias blind spot – the tendency to see oneself as less biased than other people, or to be able to identify more cognitive biases in others than in oneself.[10]
• Choice-supportive bias – the tendency to remember one's choices as better than they actually were.[11]
• Clustering illusion – the tendency to under-expect runs, streaks or clusters in small samples of random data
• Confirmation bias – the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.[12]
• Congruence bias – the tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing, in contrast to tests of possible alternative hypotheses.
• Conjunction fallacy – the tendency to assume that specific conditions are more probable than general ones.[13]
• Conservatism or Regressive Bias – tendency to underestimate high values and high likelihoods/probabilities/frequencies and overestimate low ones. Based on the observed evidence, estimates are not extreme enough[5][14][15]
• Conservatism (Bayesian) – the tendency to belief update insufficiently but predictably as a result of new evidence (estimates of conditional probabilities are conservative)[5][16][17]
• Contrast effect – the enhancement or diminishing of a weight or other measurement when compared with a recently observed contrasting object.[18]
• Curse of knowledge – when better-informed people lose the ability to understand lesser-informed people
• Decoy effect – preferences change when there is a third option that is asymmetrically dominated
• Denomination effect – the tendency to spend more money when it is denominated in small amounts (e.g. coins) rather than large amounts (e.g. bills).[19]
• Distinction bias – the tendency to view two options as more dissimilar when evaluating them simultaneously than when evaluating them separately.[20]
• Duration neglect – the neglect of the duration of an episode in determining its value
• Empathy gap – the tendency to underestimate the influence or strength of feelings, in either oneself or others.
• Endowment effect – the fact that people often demand much more to give up an object than they would be willing to pay to acquire it.[21]
• Essentialism – categorizing people and things according to their essential nature, in spite of variations.[22]
• Exaggerated expectation – based on the estimates, real-world evidence turns out to be less extreme than our expectations (conditionally inverse of the conservatism bias).[5][23]
• Experimenter's or Expectation bias – the tendency for experimenters to believe, certify, and publish data that agree with their expectations for the outcome of an experiment, and to disbelieve, discard, or downgrade the corresponding weightings for data that appear to conflict with those expectations.[24]
• Functional fixedness - limits a person to using an object only in the way it is traditionally used
• Focusing effect – the tendency to place too much importance on one aspect of an event; causes error in accurately predicting the utility of a future outcome.[25]
• Framing effect – drawing different conclusions from the same information, depending on how that information is presented.
• Frequency illusion – the illusion in which a word, a name or other thing that has recently come to one's attention suddenly appears "everywhere" with improbable frequency (see also recency illusion). Sometimes called "The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon".
• Gambler's fallacy – the tendency to think that future probabilities are altered by past events, when in reality they are unchanged. Results from an erroneous conceptualization of the Law of large numbers. For example, "I've flipped heads with this coin five times consecutively, so the chance of tails coming out on the sixth flip is much greater than heads."
• Hard-easy effect – Based on a specific level of task difficulty, the confidence in judgments is too conservative and not extreme enough[5][26][27][28]
• Hindsight bias – sometimes called the "I-knew-it-all-along" effect, the tendency to see past events as being predictable[29] at the time those events happened.(sometimes phrased as "Hindsight is 20/20")
• Hostile media effect – the tendency to see a media report as being biased due to one's own strong partisan views.
• Hyperbolic discounting – the tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs, where the tendency increases the closer to the present both payoffs are.[30]
• Illusion of control – the tendency to overestimate one's degree of influence over other external events.[31]
• Illusion of validity – when consistent but predictively weak data leads to confident predictions
• Illusory correlation – inaccurately perceiving a relationship between two unrelated events.[32][33]
• Impact bias – the tendency to overestimate the length or the intensity of the impact of future feeling states.[34]
• Information bias – the tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action.[35]
• Insensitivity to sample size – the tendency to under-expect variation in small samples
• Irrational escalation – the phenomenon where people justify increased investment in a decision, based on the cumulative prior investment, despite new evidence suggesting that the decision was probably wrong.
• Jealousy bias – a tendency to have persistent paranoid thoughts about a "mate poacher" and/or personal inadequacies in comparison to someone else. The irrational thoughts disrupt environments and routines because the bias creates compulsions.[36]
• Just-world hypothesis – the tendency for people to want to believe that the world is fundamentally just, causing them to rationalize an otherwise inexplicable injustice as deserved by the victim(s).
• Knowledge bias – the tendency of people to choose the option they know best rather than the best option.
• Less-is-better effect – a preference reversal where a dominated smaller set is preferred to a larger set
• Loss aversion – "the disutility of giving up an object is greater than the utility associated with acquiring it".[37] (see also Sunk cost effects and endowment effect).
• Mere exposure effect – the tendency to express undue liking for things merely because of familiarity with them.[38]
• Money illusion – the tendency to concentrate on the nominal (face value) of money rather than its value in terms of purchasing power.[39]
• Moral credential effect – the tendency of a track record of non-prejudice to increase subsequent prejudice.
• Negativity bias – the tendency to pay more attention and give more weight to negative than positive experiences or other kinds of information.
• Neglect of probability – the tendency to completely disregard probability when making a decision under uncertainty.[40]
• Normalcy bias – the refusal to plan for, or react to, a disaster which has never happened before.
• Observer-expectancy effect – when a researcher expects a given result and therefore unconsciously manipulates an experiment or misinterprets data in order to find it (see also subject-expectancy effect).
• Omission bias – the tendency to judge harmful actions as worse, or less moral, than equally harmful omissions (inactions).[41]
• Optimism bias – the tendency to be over-optimistic, overestimating favorable and pleasing outcomes (see also wishful thinking, valence effect, positive outcome bias).[42][43]
• Ostrich effect – ignoring an obvious (negative) situation.
• Outcome bias – the tendency to judge a decision by its eventual outcome instead of based on the quality of the decision at the time it was made.
• Overconfidence effect – excessive confidence in one's own answers to questions. For example, for certain types of questions, answers that people rate as "99% certain" turn out to be wrong 40% of the time.[5][44][45][46]
• Pareidolia – a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) is perceived as significant, e.g., seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon, and hearing non-existent hidden messages on records played in reverse.
• Pessimism bias – the tendency for some people, especially those suffering from depression, to overestimate the likelihood of negative things happening to them.
• Planning fallacy – the tendency to underestimate task-completion times.[34]
• Post-purchase rationalization – the tendency to persuade oneself through rational argument that a purchase was a good value.
• Pro-innovation bias – the tendency to reflect a personal bias towards an invention/innovation, while often failing to identify limitations and weaknesses or address the possibility of failure.
• Pseudocertainty effect – the tendency to make risk-averse choices if the expected outcome is positive, but make risk-seeking choices to avoid negative outcomes.[47]
• Reactance – the urge to do the opposite of what someone wants you to do out of a need to resist a perceived attempt to constrain your freedom of choice (see also Reverse psychology).
• Reactive devaluation – devaluing proposals that are no longer hypothetical or purportedly originated with an adversary
• Recency bias – a cognitive bias that results from disproportionate salience of recent stimuli or observations – the tendency to weigh recent events more than earlier events (see also peak-end rule, recency effect).
• Recency illusion – the illusion that a phenomenon, typically a word or language usage, that one has just begun to notice is a recent innovation (see also frequency illusion).
• Restraint bias – the tendency to overestimate one's ability to show restraint in the face of temptation.
• Rhyme as reason effect – rhyming statements are perceived as more truthful.
• Selective perception – the tendency for expectations to affect perception.
• Semmelweis reflex – the tendency to reject new evidence that contradicts a paradigm.[48]
• Social comparison bias – the tendency, when making hiring decisions, to favour potential candidates who don't compete with one's own particular strengths.[49]
• Social desirability bias - the tendency to over-report socially desirable characteristics or behaviours and under-report socially undesirable characteristics or behaviours.[50]
• Status quo bias – the tendency to like things to stay relatively the same (see also loss aversion, endowment effect, and system justification).[51][52]
• Stereotyping – expecting a member of a group to have certain characteristics without having actual information about that individual.
• Subadditivity effect – the tendency to estimate that the likelihood of an event is less than the sum of its (more than two) mutually exclusive components.[53]
• Subjective validation – perception that something is true if a subject's belief demands it to be true. Also assigns perceived connections between coincidences.
• Time-saving bias – underestimations of the time that could be saved (or lost) when increasing (or decreasing) from a relatively low speed and overestimations of the time that could be saved (or lost) when increasing (or decreasing) from a relatively high speed.
• Unit bias – the tendency to want to finish a given unit of a task or an item. Strong effects on the consumption of food in particular.[54]
• Well travelled road effect – underestimation of the duration taken to traverse oft-traveled routes and over-estimate the duration taken to traverse less familiar routes.
• Zero-risk bias – preference for reducing a small risk to zero over a greater reduction in a larger risk.
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Kevin Conville
yardbirder
"Once filter them all out and only then will you be ready to purchase!"
Say, what?!
Say, what?!
Tvc15_2000
Well-known member
Thanks I was almost out of mead and bumped off the server twice last night when I wrote the the blathery attempt at humor. I modifed it. The one sentence reply is.
I like the Leica and the Zeiss would be my choice if the Leica and Nikon were unavailbe.
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Tvc15_2000
Well-known member
Another bin I own and use is the Pentax DCF-LV 9X25 I have purchased them for as low as $150. It has a composit body. The binocular, strap and eyecup cap weigh 13 oz. Light enough to carry all day on the neck. It does not hold me back birding but it is not going to perform like your 8X32.
I am sure others can recommend some compromise binoculars if you are intrested.
I was in the woods last week and they were full of singing birds. It took longer to find them hiding in the trees. I was very happy I had lightweight bins on the all day hike.We counted 11 species.
Good birding.
Both (L and Z) are fine instruments. I've owned both, plus the Nikon HGL. I kept the Leica. I didn't like the flare in the Z, but otherwise the optics, handling and size are very nice. The L is beautifully compact and light, but expensive. If you can handle a little extra weight and bulk, and don't mind the objective-end focussing, you'll get equal optics for a lot less money with a Nikon HGL 8x20. I looked through one again (sold mine some years back) at a shop in Heathrow Airport recently and was very impressed. I think it was around 300 sterling.
Hermann
Well-known member
In Europe the Nikon HG is a less expensive alternative. I personally rate it higher than the Zeiss (less problems with flare) and slightly below the Leica.
On the other hand, the Leica you already have is optically very nice and pretty light and small ... And you get a 4mm exit pupil.
Hermann
The Ultravid 8x32 is certainly an excellent option, but is not really a substitute for the 8x20. The ultravid 8x20 is extremely functional for urban hikes, theater/shows, and travel. Just came back from a business trip in which the Ultravid 8x20 performed flawlessly without attracting too much unnecessary attention. Actually, the 8x20 is an ideal vedemecum that goes with me everywhere.
In addition to the Ultravid 8x20, I use a Zeiss FL 8x32. The performance of the zeiss is fascinating, and I use it in every weekend hike. Unfortunately, I did not try their 8x20 model, but I guess it must be excellent too. Perhaps it is prudent to try it yourself for both performance and handling (not all people like their off-center hinge design).
By the way, you may find demo Ultravids on the web here in the US that are 15 to 20% cheaper than their standard price new. Perhaps this is a good option. Best of luck.
In addition to the Ultravid 8x20, I use a Zeiss FL 8x32. The performance of the zeiss is fascinating, and I use it in every weekend hike. Unfortunately, I did not try their 8x20 model, but I guess it must be excellent too. Perhaps it is prudent to try it yourself for both performance and handling (not all people like their off-center hinge design).
By the way, you may find demo Ultravids on the web here in the US that are 15 to 20% cheaper than their standard price new. Perhaps this is a good option. Best of luck.
Alexis Powell
Natural history enthusiast
I'm not a fan of the Conquest. Inferior optics, inferior eye relief and close-focus, doesn't have a postive stop so hinges/IPD are more fiddly to adjust, doesn't have a proper strap or attachment lugs for one.
I do like the Victory a lot, but Leica Ultravid is my favorite.
--AP
Hi Alexis,
but the fact they don't have that stop is an advantage on the other hand. It makes the Conquest the most compact one among all the compact 8x20 bins, when folded to a shape Zeiss once called the "Z-folding". The ER isn't really that bad, about 15mm, when the eyecups are folded completely down. I'm mentioning this because these foldable rubber-eyecups seem to work in two steps. One has to push the eyecups down to the limit. Stray light is the most serious weakness of these but many other compacts do suffer from this as well.
Steve
Leica Trinovid 8 x 20 BCAs can do that "Z" fold too.
http://www.cameralandny.com/optics/site.pl?page=40342
They have 14mm ER. They are bright and sharp and I have used them in dark halls at concerts but I like my Zeiss 8 x 20 single hinged Victory better. It's easier to open and to set the IPD.
Bob
http://www.cameralandny.com/optics/site.pl?page=40342
They have 14mm ER. They are bright and sharp and I have used them in dark halls at concerts but I like my Zeiss 8 x 20 single hinged Victory better. It's easier to open and to set the IPD.
Bob
absolut_beethoven
Well-known member
How large is the sweet spot in the Zeiss Victory 8x20? Or to put it more precisely, what percentage of the FOV is sharp before the image softens?
And the same question above to the Leica Untravid fans. Plus one more - How much pin cushion distortion do these compacts have compared to Leica's full sized models? The same? Hopefully they have a lot less!
Thanks in advance for your answers :t:
garymh
Binocular Engineer
This is the closest I can get to a "Z fold" with the Trinovid 8x20 BCA.
Attachments
Tvc15_2000
Well-known member
On my Ultravid 10X25 their appears to be some reduction in sharpness on the outer 10% On the Nikon it appears to be less. For me it is not a problem at all. When I am gazing at the entire view it is not apparent. I do not roll my eyeball off to the edges to look at something I move the binocular. The edges are not distracting because of image quality. When observing a bird in the center the edges appear sharp. No obvious blur.
I contrast that with a pair of Vortex Vipers 10X25s I tried. My sample had a sharp spot in the center and dissatisfying blur outside that not so large central spot. I had problems making out what kind of birds were outside the central spot.
When I compared the Vortex to the Ultravid and Nikon I was far more appreciative of their quality and sent back the Vortex. There is a large difference in price between the Vortex apparently edge sharpness might be one of the tradeoffs for some of us.
Someone with resolution targets can probably provide a more accurate answer. I am just providing field notes.
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