Cameras and Lenses
Something doesn't look right here
I've been looking for my first vaguely decent pair of binoculars today at my local supplier. With a £150 budget options were limited, but its time to replace my old Chinon 8x30's with something a little better!
I was aiming for a pair of 8x42's and had a few to choose from in the price range, most notably Olympus EXPS1 (porro), Opticron Discovery WP (roof) and Vanguard (didn't get model name of these, but they're roof's too).
I particularly liked the size and handling of the opticron's, but got a very strange effect of intermittent black areas at the edges of the view, as if I'd not adjusted the eyepieces to the correct distance apart for my eyes. I tried and tried and just couldn't stop these black areas from appearing.
I thought it was just the opticron's, but strangely then got the same effect on the Vanguard's, it didn't matter how I adjusted them, parts of the view intermittently went black. I then tried some binoculars outside of my price range, the Opticron Countryman, but these were even worse. The porro Olympus , however, were very easy indeed to set up right.
It's highly unlikely that a supplier would have 3 dodgy pairs of binoculars, especially from different manufacturers, so I can only assume that the problem with the roof prisms was me! I've only used roof prism binoculars once before and that was just a quick 30 second glimpse, so is there some trick that I'm missing, something that I'm not doing right to set the binoculars up right for me or is this a common problem with roof prisms as opposed to porros?
I'm somewhat confused and would appreciate input on this curious problem!
Did you try adjusting the eye-cups ?
It does indeed seem that the eyecups were the culprit Henry.
The demo model I tried of the opticron discovery had stiff eyecups, so I'd thought I was pulling them all the way out when I wasn't! I tried with a stock pair and it worked a dream. Once I had it set up right I was very happy indeed with the quality of the image for the money, especially once I back to back tested them against my old pair.
Long and short of it is I'm now the proud owner of a pair of Opticron Discovery bins, which while they're a long way from top line are a real step up for me and will add a whole extra level of enjoyment I'm sure. To paraphrase a certain sig, the best binoculars are the one's you can actually afford to buy! 