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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kevin Purcell" data-source="post: 1386344" data-attributes="member: 68323">Perhaps. The manufacturers may be "getting their eye in" and tweaking some of their production processes. Coatings (both AR and mirror) may be slightly better. These might be from another OEM (though I wouldn't bet on it).These are certainly no worse than the other Chinese EDs (sorry if that sounds like faint praise but I mean it in a precise way of setting the lower bound) and may be slightly better. Judging these small differences is problematic (and one can get too enthusiastic about the new "Holy Grail").That said the view through these bins is very nice.I'll say more about this as I use the bins more and more.I mailed Charles at Zen-ray after posting the comment and got a response quickly (on Sunday!).He said they've noticed a similar stiffness problem on a couple of other pairs in the shipment and have tracked down the problem to different assemblers tightening the tensioning in the knob differently. It's not a knob/armor interference issue.He said they didn't prescreen the review bins. Just grabbed the retail boxes and mailed them out to the reviewers so we are getting an unbiased sample of the first production run of bins with all the variations that reveals. Quite a gutsy (or silly!) thing to do, IMHO, but we are seeing what the first batch of customers would see.He said they're modifying their assembly procedure (or perhaps making sure everyone does the same thing!) and with the second run of bins arriving next Monday they should have fixed this issue. He'll be sending me another pair of the 8x43 from the second batch for me to try out.The joy of using early production bins <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite2" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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