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Message: <blockquote data-quote="HermitIbis" data-source="post: 3390718" data-attributes="member: 128291">I am aware that this thread is old. Still, the Nikon1 V2 remains an option, and its price keeps falling. Lately I bought a used V2 and the 10-30mm lens, mainly for "other duties", not for digiscoping. But since I own a 62mm scope, the Minox MD 62 ED (with eyepiexe 22x), the idea came to mind what my cheap gear can achieve in digiscoping. It's fair to say "cheap", because I got both camera and scope second-hand, for a total amount of less than 500 Euro. Clearly, the Minox does not have the same image quality known from 80mm+ elite scopes (Swarovski, Kowa, ...). I've read enough about digiscoping in this forum to be realistic about the capabilities of a smaller scope which weighs less than 1kg. On the other side, it never hurts to check possibilities (and limits) of your gear. Sometimes I visit a wetland reservation, and long-distance shots from my SX50 of a rare bird, 200m away, can be quite disappointing. So I've decided to do a little test. The four photos below were all taken from a distance of 100 m, according to Google maps (103m, to be precise). All four are cropped and edited. In the case of photos 3 and 4 I could have used RAW instead of JPEG, but that would have meant more work, probably without changing much. Photos 1 + 2: Canon SX50, at full optical zoom (1200 mm equivalent) plus some digital (144%)Photo 3: Nikon1 V2 + 1Nikkor 70-300mm, at 300mm (810 mm equivalent).Photo 4: Minox scope with 22x eyepiece, set up on a tripod, digiscoped with the V2 plus 10-30mm kit lens at 30mm (handheld), equivalent to 1782 mm. I chose S mode at 1/800 s, to compensate for shaky hands. For me, none of the three configurations is a clear winner. The heavily cropped 1Nikkor 70-300mm lens is surprisingly close to the SX50 superzoom shots, and with a proper adapter (e.g. the Griturn) the scope/V2 would certainly have done better and may well be "theoretically" as good as the two rivals. Now I wonder: would it be worth to buy the 20-45x eyepiece for the Minox scope - could the digiscoping shots improve so much that I'd always want to carry the additional weight of 1kg to the wetland reservation to get those vastly superior 200m shots?</blockquote>

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