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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alexis Powell" data-source="post: 1642847" data-attributes="member: 5327">Ha! It's one birdwidth at the ridiculously close-up distance illustrated, but it's hundreds of square meters of sky, lake, field, mudflat, or marsh at the distances where one would actually use a scope to be scanning for and identifying birds!  I'd say the Nikon website is quite misleading.The difference in true field of view of the zoom at 27x and the 27x fixed is enormous numerically, and it is of great practical significance for anyone who uses their scope to find birds in the course of identifying them, such as while sifting through kettles of hawks, flotillas of waterfowl, flocks of longspurs, mixed groups of shorebirds, or swarms of gulls on the sides of mountains of trash at the landfill.  For me, these situations are what scoping is all about.  So far, everyone I've ever met who doesn't appreciate the utility of the wideangle eyepieces is the sort of person who uses a scope like a rifle sight, or who primarily uses their scopes at very high magnifications.  That is, they use a scope to ID particular very distant birds that they've already located with eyes or binos.  Personally, I recommend skipping the zoom, or getting it later.  I find it quite rare that I can ID a bird at 40x when I can't ID it at 27x or 30x, so I don't see the 40x of the zoom as of much practical benefit.  I don't use the ED50 in low light.  If I did, I might choose the 20x wide for regular use, but as it is, the 27x is nice because it gives me the most useful scope magnification for birding (regardless of its size/brand/style etc) and a nice wide FOV for scanning. It allows for a seamless transition between bird finding and identification in situations where I'm sifting through large groups of distant birds (which is, again, what scoping is all about in my birding life).  The zoom necessitates zooming in and out for finding versus ID, and when the true FOV of the zoom is as wide as the 27x, the magnification is greatly sacrificed.  I much prefer to keep one hand on the panning handle and one on the focus, with no need for another set of fingers to rake the zoom in and out!--AP</blockquote>

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