Telescope Reviews: Miyauchi 5x32 First Impressions/First Light

I also bought a Binon 5x32W. I'm quite happy with them on first impression. Solid, beautifully made, FBBMC optics, and my favorite, funky maroon porro II prisms. What's not to love?

They're not perfect. To my eyes, (to be taken with a grain of salt), they are very, very slightly misaglined vertically and have a small horizontal misalignment. Neither affects daytime use. The big test will be on the night sky. If they do need collimating, the adjustment is made with prism tilt adjustments found on the front of the prism housing under 4 small caps, 2 on each side.

On the cosmetic front, the black finish is rather delicate. I'll either be touching it up often or protecting high wear surfaces with some sort of transparent or black material. I might use something as simple as electrical tape. More likely I'll just let it be since I don't buy equipment for it's resale value.

The focuser is at the front of the hinge and is a little stiff with one finger focusing and very smooth if used with two fingers. There's no "hydraulic defocussing" unlike the Barska 15x70.

There's no obvious way to mount these to standard binocular adapters. But at 5x is it really necessary? There are some velcro mounts that wrap around the binoculars which would work if you had to mount them. I have no difficulty holding them steady at all.

The eyepieces deserve mention. They're big, have a resonable 66° afov and decent eye relief. Miyauchi uses stiff, foldable eye cups. With a reported 22mm eye relief, These should be usable for people wih and without glasses. For me, without glasses, they're perfect.

As one would expect, the optics don't produce a flat field. There's mild pin cushion and moderate field curvature (I think). If the central area is well focused I notice blurring about 0.7 the way to the upper and outer edge. The image stays sharp much closer to the edge towards the inner and lower edge, guesstimate of about 0.85. I think this is done deliberately to keep terrestrial targets in the sweetspot and to allow some convergence of the eyes without needing to refoucus, but that's just speculation on my part.

I'm not seeing double when I use these for astronomy. Which is another way of saying, I like them just the way they are.

I was able to easily fit the four stars of the big dipper's bowl inside the tfov. That's a minimun of 11° so the tfov is around 12°. The keystone asterism of Hercules also fits nicely in the fov. Lyra also fits within the fov, big surprise, not.

The stars are well focused. What would one expect at 5x? Does it pull in faint DSO's? No, but the bright ones are visible. Big open clusters like the Pleaides, the Hyades and the central area of Perseus are great with these binos. The Milky Way, the Andromeda galaxy and The Orion nebula are all easy to see even in my light polluted location.

No trouble seeing Jupiter as a planet and the moons were easy to see. The Moon was sharp, but at 5x the scale was a bit too small. At least 20 Moons could fit in the fov, but whose counting? This is a job for the series 8 15x70! Sunglasses optional.

I'm planning to compare them to some of my other WA binos in the future.

Peter

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Peter

Telescopes 25 - 318 mm
Binoculars 15 - 88 mm
Microscope 50x - 1000x

Edited by pcad (09/24/07 10:46 PM)