I found this article
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2018/10/05/factory-visit-steiner-optic-germany/
Are some Steiner optics still made in Germany, or partly assembled there, or is the facility for R&D?
Hi, Charlie:
I can’t say what I don’t know, and this I don’t know. I will tell you what I DO know.
— Steiner DID make optics at their plant in Germany. Whether they still do, I couldn’t say. They had the equipment and the infrastructure.
— Modern color photos have a long shelf life.
— The majority of writers doing articles for magazines depend heavily on unban legend and what the company’s senior sales rep has to say. Thus, they leave the fox to guard the henhouse.
— When a Steiner rep visited me in the late 1980s, he said: “We make binoculars for 22 armies and navies.”
— When Pioneer’s Sven Harms visited me a few months later and I mentioned that comment, he said: “We don’t make binoculars for 22 armies, just one of the biggest.” Okay, which is it; who’s lying?
— Also, that first Steiner rep showed me a photo of Carl’s Mercedes parked on top of a Steiner 7x50. I then took him outside where I pulled my pickup up on a dirt-cheap 7x50 to show him that was no great feat—just so much smoke and mirrors. Reps aren’t prepared to talk with vendors who know what the heck they are talking about.
— After my meeting with Sven, we had a good relationship and totally understood each other’s position. From that point on, he was a straight arrow with me.
— I know that in the fleet, the Steiner was known by the OMs around me as, “the disposable binocular.”
— With the failure of the M19 project, the Steiner Commander became the US Army’s M22.
— After about 5 years, they switched to the much cheaper Fujinon AR from Kamakura.
The following is from a book on the misgivings about binoculars:
“The Optics Division of Bell & Howell won the contract and started producing the
binoculars with Japanese optics.
“The Army believed the M19 could be manufactured in such a way as to dramatically cut production costs once R&D expenditures had been recouped and by 1980 production was up to about 2,000 units per month. Yet by the early 1990s, they had once again fallen back to civilian offerings for their binoculars, choosing to replace the M19 with a Steiner Commander II (without compass), calling it their new M22. Then, by the middle of the decade, they changed again. The M22 would now be the Fujinon AR (Nautilus) from Kama-Tech, the American arm of Kamakura in Japan.”
Steiner can be credited with that Auto-Focus crap that fooled so many people who knew nothing about optics. It may not have been honest advertising, but it sure made them a lot of money. :cat:
Bill