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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FrankD" data-source="post: 1277880" data-attributes="member: 18544">I would like to hear your comments as well Marcus. Maybe I am being a bit premature but I think alot of folks have been waiting for that mid-price roof prism glass that would finally stand in the company of the big boys and not blink. (Yeah, I know binoculars don't blink but...) This may very well be that glass.To elaborate a little further.......I continue to spend more and more time using this binocular exclusively. This morning my son and I went up to the local hawkwatch to see how it compared under some of the most demanding conditions, optically, that I am aware of. I say this particular activity is optically demanding because it has been my experience that hawkwatching at this locale really shows a binocular's optical faults. Color fringing, field curvature, lack of sharpness....are all fairly apparent in this activity.Well, I half expected this binocular to look less than stellar when placed in this environment. I was pleasantly surprised. Unlike many other excellent glasses out there, including a few Alphas, this binocular displays a very low level of color fringing. As with the Zeiss FL and also the Nikon SE the image looks extremely sharp. The smallest details  (windows on houses several miles away, windmills on top of mountains dozens of miles away, individual trees in forest groves miles distant) jump out at you. The distant horizon is usually the easiest way to notice color fringing in any binocular. I can easily move the horizon-line up and down in the field of view of any binocular to see how much color fringing it displays. With the Promaster the purple and green lines are visible along the horizon but only in the outer third of the image. In addition they are very thin in width. The FL controls color fringing better but the level displayed in the Promaster is quite good in my opinion.I was also switching from distant focus to relatively close focus because of warblers in some of the nearby trees. The slower focusing rate was hardly noticeable and, again, the slower speed seemed to give me slightly more control over getting the sharpest image.I had a few extremely experienced birders up there with me today. One was using the Swaro EL 8.5x42s (though he regularly used the 10x50 SLCs). The other was toting a pair of the Leica BNs (not sure if they were the 8 or 10xs). I showed the Promasters to the Swaro guy first. After looking through them for just a few seconds his first comment was "These are definitely sharp...". He was experienced enough with his own bins' specs to note that the Promaster had the same field of view and weighed about the same. Both of which he commented on. He asked the usual set of questions..."Who makes it and how much does it cost?". I filled in the blanks and he just stared a bit like I was joking.After the second gentleman came up to the site the first hawkwatcher asked for the bins again so that he could show them to the new arrival. The Leica user studied them intensely for about five minutes before he was told their cost and their name. His first response was "Do they make a 32 mm model?". He too was impressed by their performance even before being told the price.John T. knows the two gentleman I am referring to and he can verify that they know their optics. To hear those kind of comments from these gentleman definitely provided a sense of vindication of my own experiences. I still think I am imaging seeing such an excellent image from these bins.More to follow.</blockquote>

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