Steve C,
I didn't/don't want to turn this thread into a CA discussion (but see responses below) and I appreciate that your responses on that topic are earnest and measured.
Thanks for your review of these interesting binoculars. The impressive close focus and focusing ratio makes them potentially of great utility for birding+butterflying, though it seems they have a _very_ fast focusing rate, like the B&L Elite (waterproof version) and the Nikon x32 LXL models. Do you find it difficult to get precise focus at distance, or when tracking birds flying towards/away from you?
I am disappointed by the counter-clockwise to infinity direction. I use bins of both types, but since I focus with my right hand I much prefer clockwise to infinity. I wish all manufacturers would follow the L/Z/S and top-end Nikon "standard".
...I'm still looking for my first CA aware non binocular nut...
You'll find them among photographers and astronomy enthusiasts. But perhaps you mean a CA-aware person who is optics naive. I've encountered many of them among my students, using bins for the first time. Many don't comment on CA because they don't have the vocabulary, but mainly because they expect all sorts of optical ills when they look through an optical device. In other words, they don't comment on _any_ optical ills and just accept, based on their past history with cheap and horrible binoculars, cameras, telescopes (installed for public use at scenic overlooks), etc that a fun-house view is inherent to all optics. When the topic of bins first comes up, many react by saying "Oh, I've found I can see things as well or better with my eyes". They are so used to not being able to see through bins that they often don't understand why birders use them. What they find amazing is the view through a quality bin or scope. They say things like "Hey, you can actually see things better through the binoculars!" or "With these, you can actually see the bird, like you are looking at it!" or "It makes the bird look different and more real because you can see how it looks!" or "With these, you can see that the bird has details that you have to use binoculars to see!"
...I'm not sure you CA sensitive guys have the ability to grasp what a non CA sensitive view is...
Actually, I think many of us do. When I don't direct my consciousness to it, I am able to ignore it much of the time and many circumstances, whether in my eyeglasses or my binoculars.
...AP posted earlier about the importance of CA, whether you see it or not... ...I have always thought it was a step less my brain needed to go through to eliminate the sight... ...If I don't see it and you do and we both oohh and aaahhh over the view in a terrific binocular neither of us see CA in, is the image brighter/better for me?... ...How do I see the image as degraded when it clearly is not?...
Our brains probably have some ability to correct for CA (a sort of deconvolution ability), but that ability has to be very limited (as is that of image editing programs, like Adobe Photoshop) in comparison to our ability to remove its presence from awareness, which has almost no limits when it comes to CA and many other aspects of perception, visual or otherwise. So even when we are not aware of CA, our view is made up from point "data" where different colors of light coming from the same point coordinates in the world do not focus to the same point on our retina. Consequently, the view will be lower in contrast and color definition, and ultimately, in apparent sharpness.
The ability/inability to "see" rolling ball (that others sometimes make) is to me not the same. In that case, it is an issue of how the brain interprets the sensory information, so if the spatial interpretive framework is correct or once it is corrected, the problem is nonexistant or fixed. Rolling ball exists in the mind's eye only, it is an issue of perception, not the underlying "data", not the way light reaches the eye and is brought to the retina. It can't be photographed, though photos or videos can evoke it.
Perhaps a better comparison is to when one's brain corrects for pincushion, barrel, or other such distortions. The inferences that the brain makes about proper dimensional relationships can be quite accurate, so when the "data" is replotted properly on the spatial coordinate grid of the mind's eye, it can be fixed (kind of like correcting for pincushion, barrel, or keystone distortions in Adobe Photoshop), not just removed from consciousness. But we can still be fooled, as sometimes is made use of in architecture (e.g. in the design of some Greek columns and colonnades). Luckily, being fooled in those ways probably has little importance for birding, which is all about fine scale color and contrast distinctions, and where shape discernment is done at a spatial scale too small to be affected by small errors in the overall projection of a scene in our mind's eye.
--AP
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