There may come a time when corrective lens will not achieve the balance between your eyes for optimum binocular use. When you reach that time or point, a high quality monocular may serve you better than you would think possible.
Over the years I have observed persons who just have difficulty using binoculars. They can't get them to focus, find them awkward to use, etc.
Of course many binoculars out in BF land are slightly out of collimation, ergonomically so so, or just plain optically inferior. These folks often give up on binoculars without really understanding why they have done so.
They may like me have eyes that are unequal in acuity and uncorrectable with prescription eye glasses. For years I naively assumed that once I had glasses, my acuity and astigmatism problems would be solved. But a closer examination has shown otherwise.
It is perhaps equally naive to assume that the optics in both right and left barrels are identical, especially in high end optics. I think we all have seen otherwise. A story comes to mind. I had a professor friend who had a middlin pair of binoculars which he took apart to clean. They were badly out of collimation when he reassembled them, and I told him so. But he found them OK. Why? Because he was blind in one eye. A monocular would have served him well.
At the rifle range one day punching holes in targets, I discovered my eyes were not well matched. I habitually use my right eye with a spotting scope. Nothing is harder than finding small caliber holes in a black target at long range. I couldn't find the holes but a fellow shooter looking through my spotting scope could. He suggested I try my left eye. And yes, I could barely see the holes. Two things were learned that day. One, my eyes are not as good as I thought they were, and two, my left eye is the better one.
Applying this to binoculars got me thinking. Perhaps for occasional use, a monocular would be just fine. But I had to demonstrate to myself first that I could focus my right eye as well as my left eye through my alpha binoculars.
But I can't. So now I am using my monocular more and more and learning to steady it. It is handy, easy to carry in one pocket, and very satisfying. I'm not suggesting that the reader abandon his binoculars. For some out there in BF land a quality monocular may be a good choice as you grow older.
John
Thanks for that, John. Itīs one of the issues that Iīve thought about now that Iīm a card-carrying member of the Grey Population....over the years my parts will begin to wear out and the grim reality is that no amount of alpha technology will reverse the process. Canīt wait to start testing "alpha monoculars" when the time comes!
I wear glasses mostly for reading and driving at night, and have almost always had the the problem that when I use binoculars without the glasses, no one diopter setting ever works for me. The diopter is supposedly set for one setting and works near and far. I suspect my eyes are similar at far distance and more different at close.
The problem is lesss and less, the more I pay for the binos, and 8x is definitely easier than 10x.