Hummingbird Micro-scopes (1 Viewer)

There's a generally positive review of the new Celestron Hummingbird x9-x27x56 "micro-scope" in the latest edition of 'Birdwatch'. It uses ED glass, is waterproof, the FoV is 74-32m at 1000M and only weighs 590g (inc. eyepiece). There's an even smaller x7-x22x50 scope which weight 540g (not sure of the price). Just how small these scopes are can be appreciated by this video

Celestron may be an unfashionable brand, but I really like the specifications of the 'less small' scope. I'm not sure how much that extra 6mm makes, but every little helps. It's about time Nikon lost its bragging rights as the best small travel scope

John,

I have the 50 mm of this scope, under another brand name, for review purposes.

http://athlonoptics.com/product/ares-7-5-22-5-ed/

In many ways it is an attractive scope...exceptionally small and good image quality up to about 15x... but it is in no way a competitor with either the Nikon ED 50 or the Opticron MM3 50 mm. These new mini-scopes are made for their weight and compactness at a cost to image quality. They give a slight increase in magnification over a normally configured binocular (8x42, 10x42, 8x32, etc...) but they aren't really a replacement for a typical spotting scope...even the Nikon and Opticron.

Thanks, Frank. Perhaps, though it may encourage some of the 'big players' to pick the challenge. Given the popularity of the Nikon scope I'm surprised that they haven't already done so

the Athlon has a 0.5x higher magnification on both ends. also, are the Hummingbirds speced the same to the manufacturer by the respective companies?

Hi

I had the opportunity to have a quick look through these at the Celestron booth on an astro fair some days ago and while I couldn't take them outside, the view inside the building was quite ok even at their respective max magnification (which is not a lot of course).

The digiscoped image with the bad vignetting shown above certainly does not look like what I saw. Of course since it was the celestron booth, it might have been a hand picked demo.

Unfortunately I didn't see this thread until the last post so I didn't do a a more formal eval. But I'll look out if I get to see them again somewhere... although I've got enough glass - repeat - I've got enough glass, I've got enough glass ;-)

Joachim