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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ksbird/foxranch" data-source="post: 1306723" data-attributes="member: 37413">Kevin here are a few problems with what you have said. #1 the US military pays  more for the Fujinon FMT 7x50 (M22) than Zeiss charges the Bundeswehr for their German military bin. Of course since this same M22 binocular has been sold to the US military since 1986 (and perhaps they have cheaper back stocks sitting around), it has also Never Been Bested in actual field trials, in spite of the attempts by the German companies, Bushnell, B&L and Nikon to compete with this item. The US military really doesn't care what the price of a binocular is if it gives troops a life-or-death advantage in combat. (look at the $5000 M25 bins) #2 NATO would love to be standardized but the Zeiss Bundeswehr roofer went against the Fuji 7x50 M22 and lost miserably on the basis of sharpness and FOV.  The M24 you speak of is a "throw away" binocular not used for important field command battle direction. In fact the M24 was made as a "much cheaper version" of the Zeiss Bundeswehr binocular.#3 some sites dispute your opinion about what humans can see.<a href="http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/colcon.html#c1" target="_blank">http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/colcon.html#c1</a>which says our color sensitivity is about equal between 500nm and 600nm (bluegreen thru red)and equally as sensitive between 430nm and 450nm (the blue range). This is a much better representation of what colors and how much of them humans see than Wiki, where the sensitivity curves are much tougher to understand.In addition many people have 4 types of color receptors.<a href="http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_colors_can_the_human_eye_see" target="_blank">http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_colors_can_the_human_eye_see</a>In general cyan is the most difficult color for humans to register well but all this assumes Helmholtz is right and not Hering (most knowledgable photographers and phot-optics researchers I know think Hering is right in which case the brain sorts out an infinite number of colors). I have no idea why people think that because there are peaks in the sensitivity of human eyes to specific color wavelength they can't realize that 2 types of test studies prove that the peaks don't define everything. Current theory is that everyone's eyes can correctly perceive "millions and millions" of light wavelengths about equally.<a href="http://ask.yahoo.com/20041227.html" target="_blank">http://ask.yahoo.com/20041227.html</a>One group of test studies measured where the peak color sensitivity is in a group of people and they find that peak color sensitivities AREN'T THE SAME FOR ANY OF THE PEOPLE BEING TESTED. So the curves we see in nice charts are only the AVERAGES of a bunch of those tests. We all see color differently is the result of all studies to date.So who is Zeiss making those 20 different peak frequencies phase coherent for? The average? The test designer? The optical designer? The Marketing Manager (most likely since the product managers all work for Marketing). Who? In addition they now know that as many as 10% of the population has 4 color sensors in the eye. Many of those people are women. So in fact women may be more sensitive to the millions and millions of color frequencies we can EQUALLY perceive than men.As well your understanding of antireflection coatings is wrong (at least in the photo business). The water-white antireflection coating zirconium oxide helps to increase coherent light transmission through any piece of glass by about 6% over an uncoated lens (multicoated zirconium oxide can drop reflections to about 1% fully wideband). There is no peak band of light frequencies that are rejected (the colors we see in the reflections of antireflection coatings are the narrow band REJECTIONS of a small part of the visible light spectrum. Most cheap anti reflection coatings reject certain light frequency wavelengths substantially more than others, the original magnesium flouride coatings showed blue reflections because they reflected the blues more than other frequencies. When the reflections from the coatings reject too much of a certain bandpass, manufacturers try to balance the visible impression by using coatings that reject different colors so as to give a more balanced color view.  Of course in the case of companies like Nikon, they just made the color rejection of their green/cyan multicoatings so narrowband, it was difficult for the eye to perceive (even if it made their lenses unsuitable for use with certain films).When all of the opinions were set aside and Nikon engineers sat down to discuss ideas they all had about just how widely varied human color perception really was (so we should never be treating anything to do with human color perception as "consistent" or at all standardized), which means that if an optical designer is trying to "design out" something like phase distortion, THERE IS NO STANDARD TO CORRECT TO. We are all different in how we perceive colors. That's why people's opinions about image quality in roofer binoculars can vary so widely.But it also means that a binocular design like a porro prism which has no phase incoherence MUST be much better (all other things being equal) than any roofer system that at best corrects the phase incoherence perceptions in as few 7% or 8% of the population. Since ALL bin users are going to have different perceptions of where their peak color sensitivities are, unless the manufacturers correct for each individual person's particular light/color sensitivity curve (or in this case makes the colors coherent based on each individual's particular sensitivity to color phase coherence) the manufacturer's efforts are generally wasted like a dog chasing it's tail.EXCEPT FOR THE MARKETING VALUE OF MAKING generally useless "improvements" with phase correction filter layers, I'm not saying that manufacturers shouldn't develop phase coherence filter layers. But they should be "water white and wide band", so when the manufacturers come up with a phase coherence filter layer that is wider in fully-phase-corrected bandwidth that the widest sensitive human eye with no peaks and valleys, then it could make roofers as sharp as porros. Setting aside other  qualities like field of view or eye relief or water resistance there is no real quality variation in a porro image because there is no phase incoherence "softening" a light frequencies that may or may not line up with a person's peak sensitivities to colors. But with a roofer there could easily be 14 different opinions (only) on the idea of whether a specific roofer is super sharp or just sort of sharp in the images it produces because no one could ever know whether the phase coherence filter layers used in the binocular in question lined up nicely with the color sensitivity peaks of the viewer's eye, or just the opposite, where the filters non-phase-coherent frequencies lined up with the viewer's peak eye sensitivities. In the first case the viewer looking through that roofer would see a nice sharp view (with his brain rejecting the unsharp colors), while the second viewer would see nothing but the incoherent colors and the view would look muddy and soft. This makes buying any roofer a terrible crapshoot, especially when there are much less expensive bins like the Nikon SE series that are nearly unanimously chosen as producing the best images in the world by most reviewers. This might account for why roofers fail most of the time when the military puts out cost-is-no-object trials for binoculars. The Fuji M22 wins because it really is the best (while also being at least as ruggedly made and waterproof as any other contestant). At least with a porro what a reviewer sees is likely what the random buyer will see as well.I still don't see an answer to my question about why, in spite of them being less than half the cost of the most expensive roofers, the Nikon SE series or the Fujinon FMT series are the 2 most common Reference Standard bins in the world. Porros are just not only sharper, they are sharper for the vast majority of potential users, while the best roofers are only sharp for a small minority of people whose color sensitivity peaks line up with the phase coherence filters used.</blockquote>

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