Hi Joachim, I must admit that all the time when I read certain statements, I always accuse a little tremor.
It sounds more like terrorism than good information.
...
There is also a physical explanation for this. And certainly the explanation does not change based on what the majority of users do or not.
Let everyone evaluate their own needs and abilities for themselves, without conveying their thoughts with useless statements.
Do you agree?
Dear Rico,
so you are chastising me for generalizing my experiences but on the other hand quietly imply that whatever your experience might be with easily hand holding super high magnification bins without support might be valid for everybody...
Quietly ignoring that lots of other people have written about their not so positive experiences with that and various well respected optics suppliers have gone to great lengths to design and build different image stabilized binoculars - which are obviously completely useless in your opinion but have a lot of very satisfied users.
Sorry, but I beg to disagree and will continue to give the advice that 10x is the maximum which most people can hand hold without help by stabilization or bracing.
Those who absolutely want to try higher are of course welcome to do so - but please not as a first pair of bins and without trying.
And yes, there is an easy geometrical explanation why higher magnification binoculars get impractical when hand held. Everybody - yes, even you - has a certain amount of tremor when holding a pair of bins. In your case it might be less than with mere mortals like us - that is if you haven't just read my posts ;-)
This results in the bins pointing not quite in the direction you want to look but being a tiny angle off. For an 8x pair of bins this will result in the bird moving around a little bit inside the field of view but that is easily fixed by the brain.
For a 25x pair of bins on the other hand this means that the bird moves 3 times as much and might even leave the field of view entirely. This is usually too much for the brain to compensate and results into less detail being perceived.
For a more scholarly but still readily understandable explanation I recommend Holger Merlitz, Handfernglaeser, Europa Lehrmittel, 2013 chapter 8.3. This is unfortunately only available in german so far.
He quotes two relevant papers on this which are available in english but might be a bit more scientific and also not easily available unless you happen to have access to a well sorted library on optical engineering or the online archives of the journals in question. I'll give the sources anyways...
H. Schober, U. Miller and B.Huber, Measurement of the Muscle tremble Associated with Hand-Held Field-Glasses, J. Opt. Soc. Am. 53 p. 1336 (1963)
D. Vukobratovich, Binocular performance and design, Proc. of SPIE 1168, Current Developments in Optical Engineering and Commercial Optics, ed. R.E. Fischer, H.M. Pallicove, W.J.Smith (1989)
The latter one can be easily found online via google atm - see figure 1 for Mr Vukobratovich's results.
Joachim