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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alexis Powell" data-source="post: 3648749" data-attributes="member: 5327">I was very impressed with the image through my Nikon 8x40 DCF Classic Eagle roofs, which lack phase coatings. They were the first bins that I owned (and thus that I really got to know through extended use) that had decent eye-relief for glasses, a big sweet spot (due to flat field correction), smooth easy precise focus operation, and fit my hands well. Those qualities made that bin so easy to look through and use to find birds, and so superior overall to any of the $45 porros that I'd borrowed or used from my high school biology teacher, that I didn't find them lacking. In fact, I couldn't imagine how a bin could be any better. And on one occasion, when I compared them to a Zeiss (perhaps from the mid 1980s), I immediately found the Zeiss inferior due to its relatively poor off-axis performance.It was only later, when I bought a good porro to function as a compact travel bin (the B&L 7x26 Custom Compact), that I discovered, to my surprise, that the little compact appeared to be optically superior in some ways to my unbeatable Nikon Classic Eagles. It appeared to have better contrast, to show more detail in shadows and backlit situations, and to somehow seem sharper and brighter, despite being so much smaller. The same differences were obvious when I compared my Nikon to a Swift 8x42 Ultralite. Around that time (~1991?), B&L started aggressively advertising their use of p-coatings on their newly updated Elite bins, and describing the inferior qualities of roofs without them. Egads! Their descriptions seemed to capture what I noticed seemed lacking about my Nikon Classic Eagle compared to good porros. I couldn't afford the B&L Elite, but I kept reading about bins and started paying more attention to binocular design and tech. I noticed that Zeiss and Leica then started advertising that they'd already been using phase coatings since the late 1980s! A couple years later, when I finally had a bit of money, I purchased the Zeiss 7x42 BGATP, which was super bright and contrasty compared to my Nikons (which I then "retired"). But I missed the flat field of the Nikon. I didn't get all my favorite qualities of those two bins consolidated into one until the Swarovski 8.5x42 EL Swarovision was released.--AP</blockquote>

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