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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kabsetz" data-source="post: 3174384" data-attributes="member: 10167">High North,I generally don't like to speculate with insufficient information to back it up, but just looking at your photos it very much looks like the bridge that has cracked was magnesium and not plastic. I have seen a badly mangled Swaro magnesium binocular body (I think it was driven over by a car) and the breaking points looked similar, granular and silvery gray. If it were plastic, it would very likely be colored through and therefore black where it broke, whereas metal is oxidized or painted and the color is only on the surface, like here.What you can also see in the photo is how Z managed to keep the weight of these binoculars so low. There really is no excess metal visible anywhere.It is too bad you had the accident, and I hope all will turn out well for you. But, I don't think binoculars should be designed to survive falls on stone floors unless they are intended for marine or military uses or the like. If we insisted on birding binoculars to do that, we'd have to accept significantly higher weights and thicker armorings, and even then there would always be the odd accident where the binocular would break anyway and the owner would be unhappy because it was supposed to be shockproof.Ironically, this might have been just the kind of an accident where the composite body that Zeiss was advocating earlier and that was used in the older Victory series could have survived better than the magnesium body which they adopted for the SF because birders  prefer its more solid "feel". Nevertheless, I still personally prefer the use of metals for binocular and scope bodies, despite having had my own mishaps once or twice in the past.In summary, accidents happen, every accident is different, and it is not possible to draw conclusions about the durability or lack thereof of a binocular model based on isolated accidents.Kimmo</blockquote>

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