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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hermann" data-source="post: 1311530" data-attributes="member: 4925">Makes a lot of sense. There's one other aspect I forgot to mention though: When focussing with your eyes from infinity to your near point, the eye pupils are drawn slightly closer together. This in turn mean that focussing with your eyes works best with binoculars with largish exit pupils. That's one of the reasons why many people find small binoculars (8x20's for instance) difficult to deal with. But even with larger binoculars some eyepieces work better than others because some eyepieces don't work that well when you don't place the eye pupil right in the centre of the exit pupil of the eyepiece. IMO one of the reasons why the Zeiss 7x72 Classic was such a great success was that it worked very well in that respect for most people. In fact, before phase coating was introduced it was possible to avoid the detrimental effects of the roof prism by placing the eye pupil in one half of the exit pupil of the binoculars. That also worked quite well with the 7x42's, even though the binoculars were not optimized for that kind of use. Another point: Porros may appear to some people to have a larger DOF because the image doesn't look so "flat" because of the greater distance between the objective lenses. That's largely subjective though. I personally tend to prefer porros for that reason, some of my friends on the other hand don't see any difference at all.To come back to the original question: I personally feel that binoculars with an exit pupil of at least 4mm and a magnification of 7x to 8x work best as a warbler glass. In some habitats 10x might also work. I also think that the weight shouldn't be above something like 800 gr and the focussing should be reasonably fast. That's why I prefer my old Leica 8x32's over the Nikon 8x32 SE's, even though the optics of the SE's are better. The focussing is faster, and speed matters a lot when you're at a migration hotspot.What's most important is that you actually try different pairs in the field to find out which one suits you best, in other words which you feel most comfortable with. I never got to grips with the Swarovski EL's, for instance. I just didn't like them. I also still prefer the "old" Zeiss Victory II over the Victory FL. Go figure.Hermann</blockquote>

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