The mother of a friend is considering buying a monocular (she can't use binoculars). She is nothing like an expert, and doesn't need/want anything hugely exotic or expensive. This is very much out of my area of knowledge, so I am hoping someone can give me some advice I can pass on as to what to look for (general purpose birding and so on), good brands, that sort of thing.
I am assuming that the same sort of considerations re magnification and so on that apply to binoculars also apply to monoculars?
Any help would be much appreciated.
Monoculars are hard to use and keep steady because of their small size. And the good ones are quite expensive. The inexpensive one's aren't very good.
Has she considered using a small binocular with a cover over the lens she won't be using. I would think that one with a nice wide field of view would be ideal. You might find something suitable with Opticron. They have a lightweight series of 6x32,8x32 and 10x32.
I recall a woman using a very large Swarovski binocular at Cape May, NJ. It looked like at least a 10 x 50 and might have even been a 56mm binocular. She had one objective lens capped and was using the binocular like a telescope, holding it vertically but with both hands for stability and looking through it with one eye.
Bob
[QUOTE=ceasar;2353370]Monoculars are hard to use and keep steady because of their small size. And the good ones are quite expensive. The inexpensive one's aren't very good.
Has she considered using a small binocular with a cover over the lens she won't be using. I would think that one with a nice wide field of view would be ideal. You might find something suitable with Opticron. They have a lightweight series of 6x32,8x32 and 10x32.
I recall a woman using a very large Swarovski binocular at Cape May, NJ. It looked like at least a 10 x 50 and might have even been a 56mm binocular. She had one objective lens capped and was using the binocular like a telescope, holding it vertically but with both hands for stability and looking through it with one eye.
Bob[/QUOTE]
Thank you for that. I sort of suspected that there would be drawbacks. I think the idea of the monocular is to have something as small as possible - though as you suggest indirectly, small isn't much use if she can't see anything!