A Milwaukee birding pal and I have been having an "arguement" about our bins. It is not about whose make is better, but about the configurations.
Our forest/general bins are in the same price range, but I use 8x32 and 7x42, both of which work great for general birding. The debate comes when I am visiting and we wander to the edge of the reserve and find ourselves on the shore of Lake Michigan. I rarely have luggage space to drag my scope with so we use what we have on the migrating waterfowl and shorebirds.
Here is the debate. I contend that his 7x42s are the better of the two when presented with distant birds seen when at the shore for sake of the larger aperture giving more detail over distance. He would prefer to use my 8x32s because of the slight magnification advantage.
It is not important if I am right or he is, but we thought we would invite others into the debate. Thoughts?
[QUOTE=Robert Ellis]A Milwaukee birding pal and I have been having an "arguement" about our bins. It is not about whose make is better, but about the configurations.
Our forest/general bins are in the same price range, but I use 8x32 and 7x42, both of which work great for general birding. The debate comes when I am visiting and we wander to the edge of the reserve and find ourselves on the shore of Lake Michigan. I rarely have luggage space to drag my scope with so we use what we have on the migrating waterfowl and shorebirds.
Here is the debate. I contend that his 7x42s are the better of the two when presented with distant birds seen when at the shore for sake of the larger aperture giving more detail over distance. He would prefer to use my 8x32s because of the slight magnification advantage.
It is not important if I am right or he is, but we thought we would invite others into the debate. Thoughts?[/QUOTE]
IMO, in daylight I'd prefer the 8x and the additional magnification.
Doug
Although they claim that more magnification doesn't matter as far as resolving fine detail (the quality of the optics is the most critical thing), given the choice, I'd take the higher magnification over the larger aperture. I'm not even sure if "larger aperture giving more detail over distance" is true. I've always thought that the advantage of a larger aperture was in light-gathering, useful for low-light conditions.
However, having said that, viewing over long distances has so many other problems (bad "seeing" being the main one), I doubt that either binoc would have much advantage over the other.