BirdForum is the net's largest birding community dedicated to wild birds and birding, and is absolutely FREE!

Register for an account to take part in lively discussions in the forum, post your pictures in the gallery and more.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="brocknroller" data-source="post: 1602317" data-attributes="member: 665">GOOD QUESTION, Ardy!!! I think I answered it in bits and pieces on various BF threads, but here's a summary...First, Nikon did update the SE's coatings - at least on the 505 and 550s, perhaps 504s too, but I have only compared the difference btwn the 505 and earlier 501 SE, and there's a very noticeable ("hit your eye like a big pizza pie") difference in contrast and color depth in the newer 505 version. That's amore! I've also compared the 505 SE (just today, in fact, during our daily Cloudy Valley 1/2 hour sunshine allowance btwn 5 p.m.-5:30 p.m) with the 8x32 LX, which some (including me) consider to be up there in the alphasphere except for the price (and more recently, the ED/FL/HD/whatever-comes-next-in-the-alphabet-low-dispersion glass). The LX was ahead of its time so it's taken awhile for other roof makers to catch up with Nikon's coatings (and its smooth as a baby's bottom focuser). The SE was ahead of its time too in overall optical quality and optical train design, and it's taken the alpha roof makers some time to... to...well, to...nope, I guess they're still working on it! <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" />Seriously, folks, the past 12 years have seen amazing advances in roof optics, from the pre-phase coated Nikon Sporter, to the phase coated Monarchs, to the p-coated and zoot (silver) coated LX (we won't talk about the lead-free LX L, somebody at the Nikon optics lab must have read the formulas for the coatings and glass upside down - probably the same inverted vision opticians that made the original Zeiss Victory <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" />, to the dielectric coatings and ED glass of the EDG, a lead-free roof bin I can not only live with but recommend (though that's also true of the much less expensive lead-free EII and the presumably lead-free 505 SE that came before).So what's happened, not only with Nikon but Zeiss, Leica, Swaro, Pentax, Leupold, et al is that roof bin manufacturers have spent an enormous amount of time and money trying to overcome the inherent flaws of the roof prism design so they could produce a roof bin that is optically on par with a $399-$599 porro (EII/SE), with some added bells and whistles (WP,FP,twist-up eyecups, and ED glass, which could be found in some porros 20 years ago), and then charge prices too obscene to mention to recoup all that R & D.  IMO, the time since the SE was first introduced has been spent mostly on trying to get roofs to catch-up with what the SE/EII and some other high end porros already had and then make them WP/FP, add some amenities, and finally exotic glasses to get rid of the pesky CA in the roofs. The only reason that some of the best porros ever made don't have the latest and greatest 99-layer AR coatings is that manufacturers gave up on making premium porros, allegedly, to GIVE THE PEOPLE WHAT THEY WANT. Do you think if the "people" knew that the Great Roof Experiment was going to cost them $2K a pop that they would have agreed and said, Yeah, go ahead, give us what we want and fagatabout the cost!  We the People already knew that porros could be water sealed (though it makes the focusers harder to turn) and now we know (and in theory, manufacturers have known for as long as we knew it about roofs), they can be made with internal focusers and with nitrogen/argon gas like roofs.So I'm scratching my head (oh, got to get some Selsun Blue), wondering why the bleep it took so long for manufacturers to realize this self-evident truth when they could have saved themselves and their customers enormous amounts of money by simply updating the fine porros of yesteryear. In the early years, comparable configuration roofs even weighed as much or in some cases actually outweighed porros. So that couldn't be the reason. As far as ergonomics, surely there must be a lot of birders with big hands like me, who find roofs a bit unwieldy (yes, you put your thumbs backward, but keep doing that for long periods of time and you'll end up with Carpal Tunnel Syndrome!). So the question is: Given that optics manufacturers could simply update porros with WP, FP, twist-ups, super duper AR coatings, and all the bells and whistles that people have come to expect in premium roofs, WHY did they plod on and on all these years with correcting the flaws of roofs rather than simply update excellent porros like the Nikon SE? This is what I call my "M & M Theory" of Roof Development: Mystique and Money. Porros were ho-hum. They were your dad's Oldsmobile. Are you going to take your girlfriend birding in your dad's Oldsmobile? Heck, it was in large part that "old fart stigma" that killed the Oldsmobile. My Great Grandfather drove an Oldsmobile.My Grandfather drives an Oldsmobile.My Father drives an Oldsmobile.I drive an Oldsmobile.My children will not drive Oldsmobiles! Replace the word "Oldsmobile" with "porro" and there you have it (or at least half of it).The other half was that in the process of making roofs as good as porros, manufacturers could (after recouping their R &  D costs) charge more money for roofs by justifying the higher cost due to roofs being more difficult to make (an argument that itself is more difficult to make now that Chinese companies like Zen Ray, Promaster, and Frontier have entered the fray with good quality ED roofs "at a price you can afford").I realize that this is probably not a popular view and one that might be frowned upon in the roof-friendly BF community, and admittedly, I don't have the technical documentation to back up it up (the documents are locked away in heavy duty, fire-proof and burglar-proof 1-ton safes at Zeiss, Leica, Swaro, and Nikon <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" />.However, when you look at the advances these companies have made in their top-o'-the-line roofs, most of them have been about tweaking roofs to make them brighter, sharper, and have less CA... ur..like good quality porros. So that's my porro-prism filtered view of bin history.As Cowboy Jack Clement and Johnny Cash used to sing: "I don't like it but I guess things happen that way."Brock</blockquote>

Verification