Over the past few months I have had several opportunities to look through the Swarovski EL 10x42 SV and had become a little dissatisfied with my 10x42 FL. With its enormous 26 mm eye lenses it has excellent eye relief for glasses wearers and an ease of view that one would suspect 5 mm or 6 mm exit pupils instead of 4,2 mm. I also find the edge sharpness and lack of distortion very appealing and have no problems with "rolling ball."
I have just taken the plunge and am extremely satisfied. My example has pleasantly smooth focussing, which requires somewhat more torque in the clockwise direction than anti-clockwise. I assume that there is some pre-loading, which works the other way on my old 7x42 SLC. Perhaps this is due to to the change from a positive focussing element in the SLC to a negative one in the EL SV. Both, of course, focus clockwise to infinity and the SV requires about 200° rotation from 5 m to infinity, not too fast and not too slow. Swarovski allegedly are still having problems with the focussing mechanism on the 50 mm ELs and are selecting and reworking.
I half expected to be offered a Nikon EDG for comparison but after the tsunami Nikon are having production problems and the 10x42 is not expected for a while. Instead I was shown a 10x42 SLC HD but it was not to my taste, having poorer eye relief than the EL SV, pincussion and a fall-off in sharpnees at the edges.
The new field case is quite OK, perhaps a little slower to open with its zippers but has just enough room for a field guide in addition to the bins. The rain guard is still horrid hinged hard plastic and will be replaced by an oval rubber one (old Zeiss-type) and the neck strap has an ingenious but IMO useless means of rapidly changing its length. I prefer the neck strap so short that it just passes over my head but the new version cannot be shortened sufficiently without compromising security or having long loose ends. I have asked my dealer to send me an old-type neck strap.
I did note some CA toward the field edges of the SV but of a similar magnitude to the FLs. My dealer said that Kowa was the only manufacturer to have largely eliminated CA, but at a price. The glasses used in the objectives and focussing elements have a high Abbe no. but also a very high density forcing compromises in prism size and FOV to keep the weight down on the 44 mm Prominar XDs. In addition, the low dispersion glasses have higher absorption leading to poorer transmission values.
I was told that there are no plans for Ultravid replacements in the forseeable future and that the Victory FL replacements will be radically different but will not appear until next year. Zeiss will continue to update the Conquest range and the 8x30 successor will be an 8x32 weighing less than 500 g!
Now I'm looking forward to getting out in the field with my SVs and doing my monthly water bird count at the weekend.
John
Hi John, I am glad you like the 10x42 Swarovision. The 8.5x42 Swarovision I tried had a super ease of view, I just loved it. I liked it a lot better than the Swaro 8x42 HD model. No problem with the 8.5 Swarovision, just hold it up to my eyes, no tilting out from the bottom, just view, and what a view. This binocular is in another league as far as I am concerned. I will have one some day. It fit me perfectly. First binocular to do that.
"Swarovski allegedly are still having problems with the focussing mechanism on the 50 mm ELs and are selecting and reworking."
The "Achilles Heel" again! Why can't Swarovski manufacture focusers consistently so that they turn smoothly in both directions?????
Negative or positive lens elements, it shouldn't matter, Nikon can do it, Zeiss can do it, Leica chooses not to because of its greaseless pig design, but Swaro still has this same problem with focusers even at the $2,649 price point!!!!!!
My advice for the Wizards of Absam is to take apart an EDG II and a Premier HGL, study the focuser design, and then reverse engineer it. I think it might be their only hope.
Neoptolemus