Having just placed my eyeballs back in my head after finding a pair of Leica Trinovid 8x32 BN's in excellent condition for £*** on the net, I was wondering which optics are currently the most popular with those looking for secondhand bargains?
..and is it really worth buying a new mid priced roof when for the same money you could buy a secondhand Leica, Sawrovski, Zeiss etc?
Your thoughts welcomed!!
Matt
Matt-
"...I was wondering which optics are currently the most popular with those looking for secondhand bargains?"
Who can say? Trinovids, SLCs, Z Classics, and the various forms of Nikon high end roofs seem likely.
"..and is it really worth buying a new mid priced roof when for the same money you could buy a secondhand Leica, Sawrovski, Zeiss etc?"
This is the more interesting question. As a learning adventure it might be better to take the progressively better binocular buying and selling route. As a practical matter, it probably makes more sense to buy the good stuff used.
You'll likely end up in the same place eventually if you stay with birding and binos, and that is some high end binocular.
I think binoculars are a great bargain. Even the very best. Consider that for $2000. give or take (often much less) you get an instrument that gives you joy every time you use it and if taken care of will last a lifetime.
Seems like a bargain, especially if you place a high value on the precious time you are out in the field.
I guess I'm saying life's too short to use mediocre optics.
I've wondered about both of these questions too.
I guess I'd phrase the "which are most sought after" question as "Which good secondhand optics would you most like to buy?"
The second question is an interesting one: optics have really improved in the last decade. I find my self wondering which bin does (say) the Leupold Yosemite compare to in 2000, 1995, 1990, 1985 and so on.
I know in other fields of interst (e.g. HF amateur radio rigs) modern low-end radios can trounce the high end radios of the 1980s. And good selection can mean picking either an excellent new performer or an overlooked over-performer from the 1990s.
One thing to keep in mind with roofs (either Schmidt-Pechan or Abbe-Koenig) is "do they have phase coating". That was a introduced in the late 1980s by Zeiss and rapidly followed by the Euro 3 and others. Multilayer AR coatings were introduced in the early 1980s.
This article "On the effects of phase-corrected prisms in roof prism binoculars" from the email list on the history of binoculars archive shows perhaps the best test for which matters more: FMC or PC in a roof (short answer PC) by testing three Zeiss 10x40B (so identical optical elements) with three different sets of coatings: a 1979 model (no T* coatings and no phase-correction); 1981 with T* coatings but still without phase-corrected prisms and 1998 with both T* coatings and phase-corrected prisms.
[quote=Hermann Oldenburg]Perhaps the most interesting result initially was that the differences between the two old Zeiss 10x40B's weren't all that great. Sure, the T*-coated pair had slightly better contrast with cleaner colours and a slightly brighter image, but the difference was nothing to boast about. Even under difficult lighting conditions the difference wasn't that great. The resolution was exactly the same (as it should be), and the image of both was slightly fuzzy. This was most noticeable when checking the resolution targets.
The comparison with the pair with phase-corrected prisms was almost a foregone conclusion after these results. And sure, it had much better contrast and cleaner colours, a brighter image and quite clearly a higher resolution than either of the two pairs without phase-corrected prisms. In fact, the difference was nothing short of amazing.
I believe this comparison puts some of the claims made about modern multicoatings into perspective. Modern multicoantings are nice, but they're not the most important thing to watch out for in roof prism binoculars. Based on this comparison I'd say the most important progress has not been the development of modern muticoatings, but rather the development of phase-correction coatings on the prisms. [/quote]
The comment at the end is also interesting to read:
[quote=Hermann Oldenburg]One other interesting observation we made was this: After we'd done our comparisons I got my old Zeiss West 10x50 Porros (~ 1963) from the car. My friends had got bored with testing optics by that time, so we only did a quick comparison with the new Zeiss 10x40B's, and the results were pretty amazing. Sure, the 10x40's had better contrast and a brighter image, after all, the old 10x50's only have a simple single-layer coating, but the resolution of the old 10x50's was quite noticeably *better*. In fact, the difference was so pronounced that we couldn't help but wonder why Zeiss doesn't make these binoculars with a modern T*-coating anymore. I'm sure they'd beat most (if not all) roof prisms hand down. [/quote]
More at: http://home.europa.com/~telscope/binotele.htm
So I'd be careful about putting lots of money into non-PC Euro 3 roofs of the 1980s and earlier.
I'd love to hear opinions especially on good porros. They're out of fashion but they can offer excellent optics at a lower price and be less sought after.