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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tenex" data-source="post: 3325024" data-attributes="member: 135233">Argument needs to be kept civil.  Don't call me a snob unless you want to find out what I'd think of you!  I stated an opinion which you can disagree with if you like, but doesn't need to be attacked, since it's perfectly valid.  I'll try one more time to make it clear: if I'm going to put something in front of my eyes it had better be really good.  But it's very difficult to build an excellent binocular, and naturally expensive.  People might like to think there's some way around that, and marketing can try to exploit such wishful thinking, but there's not.  Someday the situation may be different, but it isn't yet.To buy a house or car you need to start with a price point, since some would exceed most people's means by an order of magnitude.  But there are no such stratospheric objects in the (hand-held) binocular world.  That's actually surprising, since there are with cameras, for example: $26k for a Leica S2?  In contrast, alpha makers aren't producing exotic luxury items, as some like to imagine, just building to as high a level as a reasonable number of people will actually buy; and in this $2k range, which really isn't so much compared to many other things, the result is still (to me) barely good enough.  Given that context, I can't be very curious what can be bought for half as much: a range of quite similar binos coming mainly from the same few OEMs, which are far from cheap themselves yet still unsatisfying in various respects, optically and/or mechanically.  An alpha binocular will last longer than many keep a car or house, and the amortized cost isn't prohibitive for most people, so I'm curious why some act as though it was.And I was not questioning the value of "entry level" glass as someone said, but of midrange models.  I thought I made that clear.The unpleasant reactions seem to confirm that something psychologically interesting is going on here, as I suggested.</blockquote>

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