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="Kevin Purcell" data-source="post: 1401956" data-attributes="member: 68323">Some initial internal testing. Looking at my white cooker with steel kettle on top illuminated by eastern bluish sky with clouds in early afternoon (a cool white light) at about 10m.Using my non-ED roof prism bins for comparison.Brightness 1. Zeiss Victory 8x402. Bushnell Legend 8x423. Pentax DCF SP 8x324. Pentax DCF WP 8x325. Pentax DCF HS 8x366. Zen Ray ZRS 8x427. Vortex Diamondback 8x42The bigget brightness drop is from the Victory to the Legend. The others are rather closer together.Sharpness: viewing small (almost at the level of legibility) type on a calendar. Some can just about read it and others push it to not quite readable. So this is at the very fine detail. And may be dependent. But the other seemed reproducible (with bins perhaps swapping places with the bin above or below them).1. Zeiss Victory 8x402. Bushnell Legend 8x423. Pentax DCF HS 8x364. Pentax DCF WP 8x325. Pentax DCF SP 8x326. Vortex Diamondback 8x427. Zen Ray ZRS 8x42There is a bit of a spread here but the bins are tightly grouped overall i.e. there are no poor bins here. I suspect without ABing you wouldn't notice the difference most of the time though I suspect if you used a bin at the top and a bin at the bottom you'd probably mention it.The color bias these bins show to me, a red/green (i.e. my green receptor is moved towards the red) colorblind are interesting. Zeiss Victory 8x40 - neutralBushnell Legend 8x42 - neutralPentax DCF HS 8x36 - reddish side of neutral (warmer)Pentax DCF SP 8x32 - neutralPentax DCF WP 8x32 - bluish whiteZen Ray ZRS 8x42 - greenish (or greenish-yellow)Vortex Diamondback 8x42 - blueThe Zen Ray ZRF 8x42 is interesting as it's color bias is not one I've seen before sort of a greenish (or greenish-yellow) bias. It looks different to the other bins. Though I think I'd get used to it and I prefer it to the rather cold bluish biases from the older AR coatings.I see the full AFOV in the bins with a small FOV (6.4 or 6.5 degree FOV).Pentax DCF HS 8x36 - 6.5 degreesBushnell Legend 8x42 - 6.4 degreesI can just about see the full FOVZen Ray ZRS 8x42 - 7.0 degreesBut the following I see some but not all of the AFOV in these bins that have > 7 degree FOV.Zeiss Victory 8x40 - 8ish degreesVortex Diamondback 8x42 - 8ish degreesPentax DCF SP 8x32 - 7.5 degreesPentax DCF WP 8x32 - 7.5 degreesSo I guess I understand why I'm not a big fan of wide FOV bins (as I don't actually see it most of the time!) and most of the bins with > 7 degree FOV don't seem to have quite enough ER. But it seems large enough FOV in real life.EDIT: i didn't include the ZR ED 8x43 bins in this test (or any of the other Chinese ED or alphas: not quite fair) but the ZR ED would be second in brightness to the Zeiss Victory; first in sharpness test; neutral white in color bias; and I can almost-but-not-quite see the whole FOV (similar to the Zeiss).</blockquote>

Verification