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="John Finnan" data-source="post: 1840930" data-attributes="member: 17675">I've had a pair of the BGAT model for 7 years now and agree with John Dracon's remarks.  Other porro prism classics I own are the 7x50 Nikon Prostars, 10x70 Nikon Astroluxes and the 22x60 Takahashi Astronomers and I can highly recommend everyone of them (but not for birding). My son will most likely inherit them because they're all so superb I don't think that I could ever part with any of them.     The last binocular I upgraded was my former pair of Swarovski 8.5x42 ELs.  In January of this year I got the new Swarovision model that superseded them.  I very much liked the original model, but the new Swarovison model is something else.  It improves on the original model in several respects but what most impresses me about them is how well it suppresses glare and as a result how clear and vidid the images it presents are.Last month I took a daytime trip down to the Mt. Saint Helens volcano site to compare my 5 pairs of binoculars.  They all performed very well for their respective magnifications, aperture sizes and field sizes and there wasn't one that I was unhappy with or even gave a thought to parting with.  That said, the 8.5x42 Swarovision ELs provided the clearest (like the glass wasn't even there) images of any of them.  To be sure the difference was not radical, but nevertheless it was noticable and that says a lot given that it was going up against 4 of the very finest porro prism binoculars ever made.  So for terrestrial use, it is my favorate binocular.  I will have to wait until August or September to be able to take them to a really remote/high elevation dark sky site to see how well they perform for star gazing and for crusing around the Milky Way with them.  John Finnan</blockquote>

Verification