Meostar/Razor digiscoped (1 Viewer)

With so much time off from work recently I decided to attempt some digiscoping through both my Meopta Meostar and Vortex Razor 8x42s. I utilized a tripod mounting attachment to attach the bins to a tripod and a universal digiscoping adapter to mount my digital camera to both bins. Neither really offered a perfect fit so I had to improvise a bit to get fairly decent pictures.

The first picture is the Meostar. One difference I noticed is what appears to be a brighter image in the Meostar. The Razor appears darker but the details appear more defined. The Razor's field curvature is also easily noticed around the edges of the image.

Just thought this little experiment would stir some discussion. Wouldn't it be nice if we could all do something like this to help share image quality comments about any particular pair of binoculars?

FrankD said:

With so much time off from work recently I decided to attempt some digiscoping through both my Meopta Meostar and Vortex Razor 8x42s. I utilized a tripod mounting attachment to attach the bins to a tripod and a universal digiscoping adapter to mount my digital camera to both bins. Neither really offered a perfect fit so I had to improvise a bit to get fairly decent pictures.

The first picture is the Meostar. One difference I noticed is what appears to be a brighter image in the Meostar. The Razor appears darker but the details appear more defined. The Razor's field curvature is also easily noticed around the edges of the image.

Just thought this little experiment would stir some discussion. Wouldn't it be nice if we could all do something like this to help share image quality comments about any particular pair of binoculars?

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cool! can you post a picture of your set-up? On a side note, how much will the digiscoping adapter cost? Thanks a lot

NWBirder said:

cool! can you post a picture of your set-up? On a side note, how much will the digiscoping adapter cost? Thanks a lot

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I would love to but I have two problems. One, I would have to dig out my old digital camera and I honestly don't know where it is at the moment. Two, I already tore it all down.

...but I will see what I can do once I find the old camera. The UDA costs between $40 and $50 most places like adorama, B&H Photo, etc...

Frank,

Very interesting idea. When I measured the distance from the top of the bird feeder down to the dark horizontal shape on the ground behind it I found the Meostar image to be about 5% larger than the Razor. The Meostar image looks higher contrast as well as brighter on my monitor. Can you confirm the accuracy of the edge performance as seen by the eye. I think field curvature ought to be different for a flat sensor. I know so little about digiscoping that I don't know what the pitfalls are in this kind of comparison. Maybe Ikka or some other digiscopers can enlighten us.

Henry

A couple of caveats from experience:

1. If comparing brightness, disable auto exposure mode and use manual.
2. If comparing sharpness, disable auto focus. My camera has an infinity setting. (not had any success with this one)
3. If comparing scale, do not use zoom and do not turn camera off between shots, as lens extends or resets, it may not come to rest in same position.

I have not done any digiscoping, but have compared several bino images.

Frank;

Intesting photos. I wonder if you can pull exposure data from EXIF and post (ISO speed, f stop and shutter speed). Images appear to be about 1 EV difference but could be auto exposure change. Thanks

Ron

FrankD said:

The first picture is the Meostar. One difference I noticed is what appears to be a brighter image in the Meostar. The Razor appears darker but the details appear more defined. The Razor's field curvature is also easily noticed around the edges of the image.

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Very interesting, indeed, Frank. The Meostar image seems brighter, sharper and with greater depth of field. It also looks awfully cold and wintry out your way!

Henry,

I will take your word for the measurement comparison. Without measuring, the two images seem almost identical in size to me on my monitor. However, as we discussed previously, the Meostar's image appears larger to me in direct comparison to the Razor's as per the method you suggested in the other thread. I still haven't quite figured that one out but I am guessing it does have to do with the pincushion distortion and/or the field curvature.

As I mentioned in earlier posts the Meostar's image has a decidedly warm color bias to my eyes. I believe this gives the impression of a brighter image with more contrast. To my eyes the Razor seems to give better contrast during full daylight conditions. They seem to flip roles though in low light conditions. The Meostar appears brighter with better contrast.

Edge performance is pretty much what you see on the pictures. I may have to take back my earlier comments on the Razor's superior edge performance. I believe what I was seeing was some form of greater depth of field effect created by field curvature. In other words though the depth of field is very good on the Razor I thought it was even better because the outside edge displaying the field curvature was actually in focus on closer objects.This gave the impression of a lower level of edge distortion in the particular condition I was originally evaluating the bin in.

Surveyor,

Thank you for the suggestions. My digital camera has some manual adjustments but not all. I cannot adjust the exposure setting directly but can indirectly adjust via changing the ISO setting. Everything was on full auto during the process which may account for some of the differences. I did prefocus each of the binoculars for my eyes prior to utilizing the auto focus on the camera. I did receive focus lock before taking each shot and utilized a 10 second delay timer to help reduce any vibrations during the shot.

I would look for an explanation for why the camera read a different environment for each binocular when the camera was set up the same way and the binoculars were in practically identical positions. I followed your suggestion and checked the camera for the settings during each shot. The Meopta picture had the following data:

ISO 50
F 5.6
1/200

The Razor picture had the following data:

ISO 50
F 2.8
1/400

The histogram for both shots appears practically identical with a reasonable bell shape curve with the peak just a hair to the left of center.

Tom,

If you haven't figured it out I decided to keep the Meostars. I find each attractive for its own reasons. As I tried to relate in the other thread I find the Meostars image a little brighter especially in low light conditions and with a lower level of edge distortion. The Razors image appears a tad darker but the colors seem more neutral to me and details jump out a bit more in regular daylight conditions. The field curvature is the only "issue" I would have with its overall image quality.

It is mighty cold here. Low for tonight is 8 F with a wind chill of close to -20 F...and throw 6-8 inches of ice and snow on the ground.

...and since I have a nice captive audience I also took a stab of digiscoping with the Pentax 65. My only issue was that, at the time, I only had the camera on VGA resolution. I would have loved to have seen it on the 5 or 10 megapixel setting.

Oh, and just to serve as a basis for further comparison I will attempt to digiscope a picture with my Leica 7x42 BN as well.

8F above is mighty cold? Wanna come for a visit? We are coming out of a spell of overnight lows pushing -40F (air temp, not wind chill)! Daytime highs were near -10F. Could be worse, could be in Yellowknife.

Frank;

The exposure settings appear to confirm pics. The first set of reading came out to be EV 12.6 or 2913 ft/candles by approximation and the second set EV 11.6 or 1457 ft/candles by my estimate (ball park, not exact equations). It has been my experience that cameras round up or down from the calculated EV from the meter. Some cameras use half stops, some use 1/3 stops. In any case the image seems to agree with the meter and show about 1 EV difference in brightness. Depends on camera software and amount of ram it has to set individual parameters.

I have taken 2 or 3 shots from a tripod of a site within 3-5 seconds and have a full stop difference in one of them.

I generally think in terms of decibels with 1 db. Being a barely perceptible change and 3 db. being noticeable and 10 db. being about twice the apparent level.

All that being said, image perception and evaluation is highly subjective and everyone sees something different.

Have a good day.

Ron

Ron,

Thank you for the explanation. Photographic terms are something I am just beginning to understand. Your explanation was very easy to follow. I will attempt to get identical settings in future attempts. Hopefully that will further aid in comparison pieces.

On the other hand I do like the idea of being able to take a picture of the image that any given binocular delivers to use for illustrative purposes. I will try to do this as well with any future binocular purchases.

Frank;

I was going to mention focus and forgot to. I have had problems with auto focus going on a false hunt or at times when I knew binos were not focused on a particular object but something further away, the camera apparantly focus thru bin and closer object was in better focus that farther objects, so I tend not to trust it to much for comparisons.

I have used photo comparisons for color, brightness and scale but find scale to be the most reliable and reproducable. I find some spread between samples but mostly find tube to tube comparisons very close.

Ron

PS: The way exposure averages or rounds also depends on camera program and whether aperture preferred or shutter preferred, portrait or landscape mode, etc. etc. etc. Also if spot or area averaging being used.

I thought I would share a couple of my digibin attempts with you.

1. The Tripod Mount pics show a UDA sold under different names. I think EO sells as a Radian. My UDA has the Zhumell name on it.
Advantage-Very stable and repeatable. Solid mounting.
Disadvantage-Not versatile,hard to change from binocular usage to digibin and back. If you cannot set up on right eyepiece and focus through left, you may have to take mount off. With setup shown, I would not want to hang my 12x50BN Leicas on an eyepiece like the Nikons shown. Takes awhile to set up.

2. Binoculars in a tripod saddle mount. Hand hold camera to eyepiece.
Advantage- very fast and versatile. Quick to switch from bin to digibin.
Disadvantage- takes a lot of practice. Not very repeatable for quality.

3. Binocular on tripod saddle mount and camera on a Orion Steady Pix adapter but not mounted to eyepiece. Adjusted where eyepiece clamp loosely slips over eyepiece to hold camera centered and at right distance. Takes a little time to set camera up when the tripod hole is not in line with the lens but once set it is quick since the camera and mount are moved as a unit and not attached to the bino. This is the one I use most of the time. I have been meaning to try this with the fancy mount but just not have taken time to try it.

To get started, try number 2. You do not even need a tripod. Just place bin on top of a car or table or tree limb with bean bag or bino case under them and hold camera as close as you can without touching eyepiece and then adjust to stability and quality pics you want.

Surveyor,

The setup I used tends to look like your first suggestion and/or picture. I will try to put the whole setup back together again and take a picture of it with my second camera. I hope you received my return email the other day.

Thank you for sharing the pics.

FrankD said:

Surveyor,

The setup I used tends to look like your first suggestion and/or picture. I will try to put the whole setup back together again and take a picture of it with my second camera. I hope you received my return email the other day.

Thank you for sharing the pics.

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Hi Frank;

I did not get your email. Figured mine did not make it through. I have not used many of the procedures on the forum yet and still a little lost.

Surveyor,
You clearly have done a good bit of tinkering - it looks like alot of fun!
Are you taking bird/nature pics? or simply testing binos? Do you get any decent pics?
AP

Frank,
Consdering you have a digiscope, are you just testing binos with your bino-digiscope?

AP,

Digiscoping is simply a term to refer to using a digital camera and a spotting scope together usually with some type of connection device/adaptor in order to take close up shots of long distance objects. "Long distance" being anything from 10-15 yards to a hundred or better depending on your setup and expectations for image quality.

I guess the proper term for what surveyor and I are doing would be digibinning instead of digiscoping. Though it can be somewhat complicated the simple side of it is that you only need a compatible digital camera, a $40 universal digiscoping adaptor and a pair of binoculars (or spotting scope) in order to do it. There are alot of little things that increase the quality of the photos you take and the compatibility of the binocular/scope with the digital camera is a big issue but once you tinker a bit you then can get some fairly decent results.

Ron,

Your email actually ended up in my spam folder. Sometimes AOL is a pain in that regard. I will PM you on this forum with my reply.

Frank;

The only thing I had asked that I was curious about was whether or not you could get full FOV. That is something I have not been able to do. I have only got about half the FOV at best and that does not let me compare bins except for a portion of the sweet spot. If you want to pursue this avenue (and I really hope you do, this is one of the reasons I joined this forum, to refine some objective test procedures) you will want to find a manual setting or a program lock mode on your camera. Going from memory of your camera settings, some things I have had problems in the past with are sharpness; the 1/400 setting could be sharper than the 1/200 exposure due to frame freezing and this could be just the opposite of what you see. The aperture setting could mislead you on DOF i.e. the f 2.8 would show less DOF than the f 5.6. If you were able to set camera to f4 at 1/300 then the images probably be a better representation of the bino view. Focus concerns I have are that when using close up auto focus, I sometimes see the image focused different than what I see thru the bins. When I set camera for infinity focus, I have to focus the bino in the camera LCD and due to size I do not get best focus. The things that work well, in order of repeatability, are scale, color and brightness. I have had very little success with sharpness, edge distortions, etc.

I know what you mean about spam. Our IS folks at work will not consider our network safe until they get the keyboards and mice locked out.

AP;

I mainly got into this because of measurement factors. I do a lot of close range photogrametry (3d coordinates from photos with angular separation and 3d modeling).
I use bins a lot when working (over the last 40 years, if I have had my pants on, I have had a bino with me) and mostly just watch the meat eaters I see (raptors and Mississippi mosquitos). A lot of my interest has come over the years from measuring and adjusting surveying and precision machine alignment equipment.

A friend of mine is getting serious about digiscoping. He has bought the best Swarovski scope and a Canon 5d camera and I have been following his adventures. He primarily specializes in hummingbirds.

Ron

Ron,

Check your PM's. I sent a brief explanation of how I was able to get as much of a the field of view as I did in the photos. If I had to hazard a guess I believe the problem in obtaining the full field of view could possibly be the result of having a camera lens of a different diameter in comparison to the diameter of the eyepiece lens. I know that the camera needs to have a similar size or smaller in order for digiscoping to work but then many times folks use their optical zoom on the digital camera to avoid vignetting. The camera I am utilizing, a Casio Exilim EX Z1000 has a relatively small lens while both of the bins and the my scope have much larger objective lenses in comparison.