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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kevin Purcell" data-source="post: 1268170" data-attributes="member: 68323">Day 2 part 1There's not a great deal one can do to test bins in a small apartment so I took all of them to one of my local parks, Volunteer Park in Seattle. It's an urban (inner suburb) park designed by Olmstead with a mixture of deciduous and coniferous trees and ornamental planting. <a href="http://www.seattle.gov/parks/park_detail.asp?ID=399" target="_blank">http://www.seattle.gov/parks/park_detail.asp?ID=399</a>Bird life in Volunteer Park is the usual mixture in a Western city plus some oddities. It's the daytime "roost" for a large number of American crows (unpaired males and females) which makes them easy test targets in the trees. There is a large reservoir where the crows and others occasionally gather: a bald eagle has been an occasional visitor and a saw a Spotted Sandpiper bobbing around the edge of the reservoir two weeks ago. I regularly see raptors there: a Red-tailed Hawk appeared the same day as the sandpiper; I saaw a golden eagle fly through just below tree top height today. There is a Coopers Hawk nest in the park with two adults and two juveniles. At least I think they're Coopers Hawks (they're just smaller than crow-like size but a guesstimate of a juveniles length puts them right at the upper-boundary of Sharp-shinned body length. But the tails don't seem as rounded as the guides say but that might just be me being picky and the time of day ... last time I saw one the tail looked rounded).For the first day of outside testing I sat in the bench seat overlooking the reservoir on the south side in the morning. The sun was behind me and illuminating the reservoir and trees opposite meVortex Hurricane 8x28First out of the bag was the Vortex Hurricane. The tethered caps always seem to come off coming out of the case. I'm still not sure about the texturing on the barrels. It's not where my fingers and thumbs hit with my usual "delicate" fingertip grip on a compact. But I could perhaps see it being useful with gloved hands. I could get the full FOV on my left eye but not quite on my right eye. ER is "good enough" with eyeglasses. Some "kidney beaning" blackout was apparent when I was trying to check out the field of view by swiveling my eyes to look at the view. Hmmm, spherical aberration in the exit pupil. This was helped a bit by bumping up the twist-up eye-cups by one step though it mostly seemed to affect only my left eye. These bins felt "fiddley" to use. Getting my eye's lined up to the exit pupil was much more of a chore than the other (larger exit pupil bins). One of the trade offs for a compact bin but this seemed rather worse than my old Minolta Compacts. I presume the (big) different in apparent FOV is part of the problem. Depending on placement they seemed to show some CA or some "dirtiness" (not so much color as a hint of something) around crows in sunlight on the top of a tree against a blue sky.These bins were much brighter, more contrasty and sharper than the Minolta Compact 8x25 (a small decade old reverse porro).But compared to the others the view seems a bit "artificial". Like your watching remotely. I think the contrast is a bit lower than in the other bins in this review. I also go the feeling the view was a slightly different "color" but nothing I could quite put my finger on (for example, which direction was it biased). Overall the view was "like looking through a binocular" rather (as some of the others showed) "being there".Some stray light generating veiling glare was apparent too.Initial feel for depth of field is "not so bad". Seemed almost as good as the Yosemites at about 15m.The focuser action was very fluid and didn't take much to change focus. Not a great deal of snap. The focus rate seems about right to me. The hinge to is easy to move. Perhaps a little too easy excess pressure when holding it causes the IPD to change. Grip is as good as you'd expect from a compact roof more with the finger-tips and thumb-tips. I find my thumbs colliding underneath the hinge. Might have to change my grip to compensate for that.The Hurricane has a threaded tripod adaptor mount that is covered by a screw in stop. I discovered this when I found a small thread and knurled part with the Vortex logo on the bench next to me. Hmmm, nearly lost that bit. I put it back in place and tightened it up and it didn't seem like it was going to fall off again but I can see why I'd prefer push on covers for this part.</blockquote>

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