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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alexis Powell" data-source="post: 3162623" data-attributes="member: 5327">Although I offered a correction to NDHunter/Jerry's post, I still agreed with his main point, which has been lost in this discussion of when flat-field technology was invented. Nikon was the first to put it in a birding binocular, and thank goodness they did. The Nikon 8x40 Classic Eagle was my first top-end binocular. I tried the Leica and Zeiss competition of the time, and I didn't have any special names for what I was seeing, but I found their fuzzy view off-axis impossible to ignore and very disturbing. Given the reputations of the German brands, I couldn't understand why their birding roofs were only sharp right in the middle of the view (just like my Bushnell porros, except with inferior contrast!). When Zeiss introduced phase correction, the superior contrast of the 7x42 BGATP over the Classic Eagle was obvious, and the Zeiss 7x42 was also quite a bit brighter (with its AK prisms) and had a wider field of view, so it became my new birding bin. Still, I really missed the full-field "sweet spot" of the Nikon. It took almost 10 years for Nikon to introduce a phase-corrected successor to the Classic Eagle (the Venturer LX/HG), about 25 years to see flat-field tech in a euro-alpha birding roof (the SV), and an excruciating really long (nearly 30 year) wait to see, in the SF, my favorite qualities of the Nikon Classic Eagle merged with my favorite qualities of the Zeiss 7x42 BGATP. Thank goodness Swarovski took the plunge or else we might still be waiting for Zeiss. All that waiting has done nothing to convince me that the euro-alpha brands have been fully committed to the task of "just trying to make a better bino", at least for birding, or at least until now. But we still haven't seen flat-field from Leica, and we still haven't seen any of these makers of supposedly no-compromise bins use variable-ratio focus, which would greatly improve the performance of close-focusing bins. So I'm not convinced we should be waiting around quietly for them to make improvements/changes as they see fit. As a consumer, I will continue to be a squeaky wheel, in the tradition of Better View Desired and now Birdforum (minus the fanboys). --APP.S. When I wrote the above, I was thinking based on faulty recollection that the Classic Eagle was introduced in 1986. Actually, it was released in 1984. So my wait times for Zeiss and Swarovski to catch up were underestimates by about 8%.</blockquote>

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