If you’re a long-time binoculars user, the most surprising difference will be that most models now focus in reverse direction compared with your old pair, meaning now you crank right for closer-in objects.
Given the extreme similarity of design across makes and models, minor details of construction and performance can take on outsize importance. In still others, such as the now-discontinued Opticron Explorer WA Oasis-C pair, the knob was sluggish, requiring a good crank around several times to focus on anything near or far. In other models, even within the same brand (for example, the Nikon Prostaff 7S), this focusing issue was less noticeable, and they performed well in this regard. With binoculars you want a happy medium that focuses fast but allows for granular accuracy. Less rotation between silence and loudness means you can get between the extremes quickly, but you may not be able to get to precisely the level you want on the other hand, a volume knob with too much rotation takes forever to adjust. This sounds confusing, but it makes sense if you think of a focusing knob the way you might a volume control. Some models, like the Nikon Prostaff 5, focused very quickly, but that often translated to loss of detail at distance, or basically, the smooshing together of anything more than a couple hundred feet away into one focusing position. It smoothly and accurately adjusts across a wide range of focal depths. One of the best features of the Athlon Midas ED was the ease and precision of adjusting the focus. These field-of-view differences proved more noticeable when I was trying to differentiate spot-breasted wrens from rufous-and-white wrens as they crawled through vine tangles in southern Mexico, for example the Nikon pair’s narrower field, which had otherwise excellent glass, seemed to require more time to find the birds than the Athlon Midas ED did (and tellingly, by the end of the trip, I was grabbing the Athlon pair each morning). The Carson 3D binoculars were impressively sharp and easily as bright as the Athlon set, but they felt almost as if they had tunnel vision, likely because their field of view was around 20 percent narrower than that of the Athlons. The Nikon was 361 feet at 1,000 yards versus 426 feet for the Athlons, Bushnells, and Celestrons, which had the widest fields of view of the models I tested. Neither the Nikon nor the Carson model had the wide field of view at distance that the Athlon Midas ED boasted. During testing in Southern California and southern Mexico, a few other models-including the Bushnell Legend L Series, Celestron TrailSeeker, Carson 3D, and Nikon Monarch 5 (my favorite of four Nikon models at the target price)-proved very good at bringing in color under harsh conditions.
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