brocknroller
porromaniac
I'd like to know why the black body EIIs control flare better than the gray body model, that's what "baffles" me.
Indeed, the glue used on the BB EIIs is solid and heat resistant. However, the armoring itself wears more quickly than that on the GB model. In under a year of use my BBs now have worn smooth where my thumbs rest and many small dings and scratches in the black paint; in 2 years of steady use my GBs showed little wear on the grips and only slight burnishing of the body.
Your mileage, I am sure, varies.
Henry, I can't answer your rhetorical question since I didn't take the objectives apart, I can only report what I saw in comparing one 8x30 II BB with two 8x30 EII GBs side by side under challenging lighting conditions.
In my veiling glare test set-up the SE and EII perform well, but neither is completely immune to glare. The source of it in both is reflection from the objective cell. Each has a baffle behind the objective, but the baffle designs are quite different. The EII has a shallow stamped cone made of thin metal that's held in place by pressure from the back of the objective glass. The design of the cell and baffle hasn't changed since the original 8x30 E and probably goes back to the Mikrons of the 1950s. The SE has a longer grooved cone that is simply the back part of the cast magnesium objective bell. In my tests neither works much better than the other to block reflections as seen from the eyepiece. The SE might be slightly less inclined to show glare simply because the exit pupil is a little larger and the longer eye relief may place some viewers' pupils at a slightly better position for avoiding glare.
As for black bodied EII's having better glare control, that would be true only if the objective baffling cone design has been changed along with the color. The objective can be easily removed for an inspection. Does it seem likely that a decades old baffle that already works pretty well would be changed or that a baffle change would be synchronized with an unrelated body color change?
My question, is how the eyepiece differs between the SE and EII, in
these 2 models ? The SE has a flatfield design, while the EII is not.
What other differences are there ?
Disturbing to hear that with steady use, the pebbly texture wears on the BB version. The BB's armoring is so hard compared to the GB model, I wouldn't have expected that. Brock
this quick wearing of the armor is something I wasn't aware of. How serious/annoying is the issue, and would you still recommend an E II over any other alternative glass? I probably would not have even considered buying another binocular in such circumstances (from an overseas vendor with a non-US warranty), but from what I've heard these binoculars are very hard to beat from a price-performance standpoint.