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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kevin Purcell" data-source="post: 1385587" data-attributes="member: 68323">My Zen Ray EDs (an 8x and a 10x) both arrived on Saturday by priority mail just before I headed out the door to a (much delayed) Christmas party. So I put them to one side.I also avoided reading any of this thread before I'd played with the Zen Ray bins myself.Today with beautiful clear sky, bright sun and 44F (in January?) I got a chance to give them a first run through. As I'm feeling a bit "sensitive" from the party I'll just give some first impressions.I noticed this too.I played with the 10x Zen Ray ED first in the apartment. Racked the focus back and forth and got a "metal scrape" feel and sound. "Oh, that doesn't sound good". I tried it a few more times and got the same sound. So when I took them to the park bench to give them an initial tryout I was rather surprised when I couldn't get the "scrape" to occur again. The focuser action also loosened up a bit too. I suspect some grease needed to be moved around the focuser mechanism (and perhaps in the push-rods and cams). Using the 10x focuser at 44F I'd rate it as stiffer than the now well used Hawke and Promaster. In fact I noticed the Hawke focuser is stiffer than the Promaster focuser. I'd not paid attention to that before. So there is perhaps some common ground with the Zen-ray design. It's usable but not quick and not lightweight. I'll report more on this as the bin is used to see if it loosens up a bit more. For reference the Promaster is stiffer than the Zeiss Victory 8x40 focuser I've been using the most recently.With 8x Zen Ray I have the focuser is very stiff and pretty much too stiff for birding. It takes a lot of effort for one figure to turn it and you can't quickly follow a bird with it.I thought an issue might be part of the knob rubbing on the rubber armor but I suspect this isn't the case but the tolerance here is pretty tight (about the thickness of a piece of paper). For example you can slide a dollar bill into the gap without effort but you can feel the friction of the knob on the dollar bill but it doesn't increase the effort to turn the knob by a large amount. The dollar bill will move back and forth so there is some friction there.I've been working the 8x focuser back and forth but it doesn't seem to be loosening much. The force to rotate clockwise (to infinity) is slightly larger than the force required to rotate it counter-clockwise. So I can continue to test with the focuser like this but I wouldn't want to seriously bird with a focuser this stiff.This focuser mechanism seems very similar to the Hawke with a "non-rotating" badge. A little different from the more conventional knob on the Promaster.So obviously I'd like to hear from the other testers about the focuser stiffness on their bins. Is this just sample variation early in the production run?A quick look in the park seems to indicate there is something slightly better about the view of the Zen Ray ED compared to the Hawke ED or Promaster ED. Perhaps a little brighter. In this case there may be a very slightly better brightness: Zen Ray ED > Hawke ED > Promaster ED. But this is a small fraction and I think it may not be noticed without ABCing the bins. They are close.Sharpness seems about equal (just on a casual check) between all of the Chinese EDs.This is just the first part of my notes ... I shall post more later.</blockquote>

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