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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Samolot" data-source="post: 3704167" data-attributes="member: 136964"><p>Went a nice hike in the woods north of Boston with the EII's around my neck. First off, after 6 miles, I still could not feel them. At 20 oz, they are just light enough. The strap it comes with does a nice comfortable job holding them on, but ultimately a harness would do the best job to keep them from dangling around. Ergonomically, these are really perfect. The "short" stature is just long enough for me to hold them with my pinky's pointing up and out (a gentleman's binocular indeed). The wide set objectives offers a little more stability when I hold them (some of the roofs can get too narrow and fingers end up inter-twining). I had the eye piece cover mounted on both sides to the straps so when I put the optic to my face, the cover would be right under my mouth and any breath I took would easily fog up the eye pieces; easy fix - keep the eye piece cover hooked onto one strap only. And now onto the view - I believe it; short of rainy days, these are certainly my grab-and-go binoculars. Easy to to just put up to your face and enjoy the view. I am now a firm believer of wide field of view; its just really nice looking through binoculars and not feeling like you're looking through a tunnel zoomed in. The woods just opened up to me. I won't waste time talking about brightness, contrast, colors, etc... because I have no clue what I'm talking about - but these are just as good as my Meostar's, if not better. The image was certainly bright, full of color and sharp. I looked hard for any aberrations and could only appreciate a slither of it in the most difficult situation - a white feather on a mallard swimming on a blue lake under a bright sun. Essentially non-existent. What I do want to talk a little more about is the depth of field. This is unique to porro glass. With my other roofs, I felt like I had to re-focus constantly, to appreciate every twig in a bush; with these - everything is immediately in focus and clear - spotted a few hidden robins in the shrub easily with ease. A true treat was when I saw a northern cardinal - Once I focused in on it - I just followed it flying around from branch to branch through the EII's and didn't have to refocus - very cool! (Most of my optics were used for astronomy; I am just getting into birding so I had to look up what I saw when I got home, I can see the appeal to this hobby!). Whatever I saw through the naked eye immediately became 8x closer with these - its really easy to find what you were looking at because of the field of view. A note on the focus wheel - very smooth, easy to focus with one index finger, even when I wore a leather glove. Overall, it was a great day and I feel very happy with these EII's. The real bummer once again with these is the lack of weather-proofing, but otherwise these are a great tool for anyone interested in getting a closer look at the great outdoors.</p></blockquote><p></p>

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