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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ksbird/foxranch" data-source="post: 1330802" data-attributes="member: 37413">We have a pair of 25x100 bins, 30x80 and 20x80s in the really large, heavy category. They all work fine on tripods with video heads. But all of them get use pretty much exclusively for viewing bird feeders and to watch mating rituals in fixed locations (beaten down grass, posts driven into the ground about preferred feeding areas etc.) There is actually a blackbird display in my gallery photos taken through one lens of a large binocular as above, back from the day when I hand-held the digicam. Now I have a nice mount that will fix almost any of my digicams to one eyepiece while I use the other one for viewing.But we have decks and concrete pads for viewing and so tripods play-nice. I rarely truck them around unless I'm going somewhere that I know will be a good location to set up a tripod.I have 2 different pairs of 15x70 bins that work well on almost any tripod I have. In addition they work fine on my Stitz or Bogen monopods that have 3 extend-able feet on the bottom. These set-ups don't work in heavy breezes because all the support is on the bottom, so I am stuck with either hand-holding bins with 70mm objectives or I can step back to 16x50 bins then because I can definitely hand-hold them. The Pentax 20x60 (and Tento 20x60 bins) can be hand held too, or used on these monopods with feet.On a home built short telescope using a 100mm F6 flourite APO lens, I was able to move the 2 inch focuser close enough to the objective to try out an Olympus binocular viewer with a pair of 30mm - 24mm FL UWF eyepieces and a pair of very old Zeiss 30mm - 15mm FL eyepieces. The 25x and 40x views were really astounding but balancing the whole thing is so peculiar that I don't even use it much around my ranch. The old, old Zeiss microscope eyepieces were made of solid steel and brass and are very heavy (they feel like a roll of coins in your hand). And those old Zeiss Huygen eyepieces had small eye lenses so your eyes needed to be lined up just so (the Olympus UWF 24mm eyepieces have huge eye lenses). Still I have friends who bought different binocular viewers with 1x, 1.25x and 1.6x transfer lenses that allow for a variety of magnifications as well as being useful with 1.25 inch eyepieces. These spotters aren't waterproof by any means, but if you use a Televue telescope, then this expands your potential usage.</blockquote>

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