BirdForum is the net's largest birding community dedicated to wild birds and birding, and is absolutely FREE!

Register for an account to take part in lively discussions in the forum, post your pictures in the gallery and more.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="brocknroller" data-source="post: 1760173" data-attributes="member: 665">It's not a matter of smarts, but of aesthetics. Here's what Stephen Ingraham had to say on the subject: "The Leicas still have considerable distortion at the edges of the field. Straight lines bow quite noticeably. This is either a flaw or a feature, depending on who you talk to. Leica claims that the distortion is intentional: there to smooth out the "fun house" effect you often get when panning across a field of birds. I find the Leica's distortion disconcerting in many birding situations."  Someone posted somewhere, I think on BF, that the Ultravids had less pincushion than the Trinnies so I wanted to get a second opinion on that. For me, too much pincushion can be as distracting as too much "rolling ball".  For you, yes. For Holger, Henry, and Ron, no.  Though "quants" might not like to admit it, there are perceptual aspects of using optics, when the optics and the eyes and the brain all come into play in actual use, as opposed to photographing the view through the optics at 64x, which are difficult if not impossible to quantify. And even if those perceptual aspects could someday be quantified, I think Henry has already shown that people's eyes differ (barrel distortion) so that what one photographs through the lens of a camera may not be what one sees through the "camera" of their own eyes and brain. People's eyes/brains also vary in their sensitivity to pincushion, CA, brightness, color rendition, color saturation, edge sharpness, etc., etc. So while a lot of aspects of binoculars can be measured, those measurements won't necessarily tell you what you want to know or substitute for actually looking through the binoculars yourself, which lends a hint of irony to the quote in my signature. I pulled that quote from Thomas S. Kuhn's book, The Essential Tension. It opens Chapter 8, which is titled "The Function of Measurement in Modern Physical Science". Lord Kelvin's famous dictum is inscribed on the facade of the Social Sciences Research Building on the campus of the University of Chicago. Kuhn asks, "Would that statement be there if it had been written, not by a physicist, but by a sociologist, political scientist, or economist?" He suspects "No." I suspect if the answer had been "Yes," the world would be a less colorful place except for colorized fractals. <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /> <a href="http://www.backtoessentials.com/inspiration/100-beautiful-and-brilliant-fractal-images/" target="_blank">http://www.backtoessentials.com/inspiration/100-beautiful-and-brilliant-fractal-images/</a></blockquote>

Verification