birding-aus

RFI spotting scopes

To: "Peter Shute" <>
Subject: RFI spotting scopes
From: "Alistair McKeough" <>
Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2007 15:53:49 +1000
52% is a massive improvement. Enough to make a serious difference between
being able to make an ID or not. Where it gets harder is when you get a 5%
to 7% improvement going from $1600 to $3200.

Like most things the improvement in optics becomes increasingly marginal
with price. A good quality scope with a decent eyepiece should allow you to
ID just about everything in half-decent light. Once you've spent over $1.5K
the size of the objective will probably make more difference than anything
else. I doubt you'd miss many IDs against anything else with a Nikon RAII
80mm (for about $1K with eyepiece).

However, there is a real drive from the big guns to put extra-low dispersion
and fluorite glass into spotting scopes. I personally think this is being
driven in large part by a surge in digi-scoping. Yes, these super optical
glasses transfer light better meaning you in theory get a marginally better
view, but their real advantage is that they dramatically limit chromatic
aberration. Super-tight control of chroma is far more important in
photography than in bird watching - chromo you wouldn't notice when
observing can ruin a photograph. So I think with the top gun scopes you're
paying a very large premium for a try hard camera lens.

I'd happily pay double for very marginal improvements in a camera lens. I
don't know that I would in a scope. But it's very personal and only the
purchaser can decide whether it's worth it to them.

$500 or $1000 probably makes a difference in being able to make the ID.
$1500 or $3000 probably just means a better view.

Alistair


On 27/09/2007, Peter Shute <> wrote:
>
> There are some interesting pages about scopes on the Olivon website. At:
> http://www.olivonoptics.com/index.asp?PageAction=Custom&ID=12
> they say:
> "From $200 to $2000, each time you double the retail price of a spotting
> scope you can expect about a 10-15% improvement in optical performance."
>
> That would be US dollars, I guess. Applying that formula, a $400 scope
> would be 15% better than a $200 scope, $800 would be 32% better, and
> $1600 would be 52% better.
>
> A lot of money for only a 52% improvement.  Any comments?
>
> No, they don't define "optical performance".
>
> Peter Shute
>
>  wrote on Monday, 24 September 2007
> 3:25 PM:
>
> > My only word of warning is don't buy a cheap scope.
> www.birding-aus.org
> birding-aus.blogspot.com
>
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