So, I received the B2s this week, and will get my own 3s back early next week.
Both will apparently come with a less-force-required focuser, which I appreciate, and I hope also with a more-force-required IPD adjustment. I like the B2s rather stiff bridge.
The B2s are, as many owners have said, very fine glass. On more than one occasion I've been watching an animal in flight, still looking for coarser fieldmarks, then taken the binos down, put my glasses back on to try to point it out to my partner before giving her the glass - and found that the sky is empty.
Not that an animal I was looking at plumage color on three seconds ago is hard to see, but that unaided, neither of us can see it against the sky any longer.
That's very impressive performance, for me.
Yesterday morning I happened to run into some folks birding as part of an Audubon group. They indicated that one of the two habitats we were near was hard to see in due to sun glare. I took a look at both and did not have any issues with glare in the area that is observed at that hour by looking more-or-less sunward. Water strongly lit by sun was bright, but I was not troubled by glare or internal reflections.
I see but am not hypersensitive to CA. Given the photos of CA in the B1 I was curious about CA in the B2 in normal use. In normal daylight, with cloudy skies and looking across cityscapes with power lines, etc., I do not see color fringing or other indications of CA at all. In the same situations, I've seen a great deal of CA in Vanguard 10x40 ED and some CA in Nikon M7 8x42.
Tuesday night we had decent but not great viewing conditions for the moon. I had a look, both freehanding and with the binos on a tripod. The image was very good - I expect a telescope in the same condition would have been frustrating as the air wasn't great - with lots of fine details visible on the terminator. I also saw CA for the first time in these, and it was not too surprising - I could trigger it by rolling through focus; the out of focus image, unsurprisingly, showed color fringing. So the CA was a useful fine focus indicator, as it went away largely or entirely at focus.
Again, I was impressed by how little stray light was visible at the ocular - no false exit pupils as I approached them - and while viewing. These are far and away the best binos in the house for suppressing stray light, even better than the Nikon 10x40 SEs.
Also, these are the first binos I've had where I'm aware enough of my astigmatism that I may wind up preferring eyeglasses. I don't think that's a knock on the binoculars. For a time now I've felt that the overall sharpness of vision in my left, more nearsighted, eye seems less than in my right, less nearsighted, eye and I've been surprised that somehow it's easier to bring images in a telescope to good focus with the left eye than with the right.
I'd thought it was a training issue, that I was in the habit of bringing my left eye in and had better posture for doing so.
With the B2s, I'm noticing that if my glasses are on, I focus and focus snaps, with generous depth of focus on either side, but the center of focus is very well defined. If my glasses are off, I can bring each eye to focus with room to spare - yet often, I find myself wanting to get that last bit of adjustment in.
The out of focus colors in the moon got me to thinking, as changes in head position seemed to have more of an impact without glasses than with.
I went and looked at my prescription. the more myopic left eye has a small astigmatism. The less myopic right eye has about a 2D astigmatism. My interpretation is that the B2s are showing a good enough image that I'm affected by the astigmatism more than by the loss of contrast from holding the glass away from my eye.
A similar effect is happening with the telescope: the left eye shows me more than the right, despite it feeling less acute most of the time when not pressed up against an eyepiece. In particular, in the telescope I'm far more likely to get vignetting with the right than with the left eye. (and this is regardless of eyepiece, of which I have a number of fairly good ones.)
I also looked at focus wheel dynamics a bit.
I marked the focus wheel with tape so I could see how many turns I actually have, and how many I actually use.
It looks to me as if I have just more than 1.25 turns of focus total, and that with or without eyeglasses, less than a
quarter of that is available for distances I'd use binoculars for.
Let me expand a little on that: if I can spit on it, it's not something I'm likely to use a binocular on much. There's
a little more than a turn and a quarter on the B2, and infinity is reached at around 1 and 1 1/8 turn (with and without
glasses.) Close focus starts with my shoelaces, and on my pair at 3/4 of a turn I'm still inside the dining room with my glasses off, and I'm in the kitchen with my glasses on. The range from around 60 feet to the moon, then, is compressed into less than a quarter turn, since I'm still not at 60 feet in the kitchen.
Some of the compression may be down to the changed overfocus, although my corrected vision focuser spin to infinity seems pretty close to what Steve's longer review showed.
I realize that this weighting of precision focus in the near field isn't unique to the maven products. The Swarovski EL and the Nikon Monarch show very similar behavior, and the Nikon SE 10x42 does as well.
I also realize that the design of the Maven gives the glass a very good depth of focus - the radius of what's in good focus is much longer in these than in the Monarchs, for example.
But what I like about Maven is that I can describe the focuser position at around 60 feet and infinity for one of the principals, and he is looking into whether that, too, might be modifiable.
What I've told them is that I'd be happy as a clam if they came back and said "yes, we can do that, but you won't be able to focus closer than 20 feet."
