Telescope Reviews: Prefered power!

I've owned roughly 30 binos in the past 5 years and have tested maybe 2x that number (yeah, I'm a nut). My interests range from birding to astronomy and well beyond.

As far as I'm concerned, Nikon Superior E 12x50s are the best handholdable binoculars that I've ever seen. I bird with them. I astronomize with them.

I'm not as impressed with various other 12x50s such as the Pentax and Minolta and miscellaneous Chinese 12x60s and 11x56s, so this is NOT a blanket endorsement of a specific size or power, but rather jaded enthusiasm for a specific model configuration. The topend Nikon SEs really got a lot of things right.

However, for most applications, terrestial or celestial, I think that most folks that can hold them steady are best off with a decent, but not top end set of 10x50s. If I could only be limited to specifying size and power, that would be what I'd go for.

People always try to separate things like power, or objective size or exit pupil or whatever today's buzz idea is. Binoculars don't work that way. They are the most critical sum of the whole, not a specific specification.

Would I rather have Nikon SE 8x32s or random lowend Chinese 10x50s or 12x50s? Well, of course the answer is the SE 8x32s.

Back to your question about 8x50 or 10x50; it really depends on several things like quality, baffling, amount of light pollution in your viewing area, ability to hold a target shooting or camera shooting or totally passive stance. Whether you plan on bracing them or standing with arms raised, etc. A set of Zeiss 8x50 (if they even make such a thing) vs a set of lowend, improperly coated and baffled 10x50s with undersized prisms... bet on the smaller mag glass.

Age is at least somewhat irrelevent. There's a lot of nonsense on the web that would have people belive that when they reach age 40 their pupils all of a sudden can't dilate beyond N size; (usually stated as 5mm or so). The thing of it is that humans vary from under 3ft to over 7ft., so it follows that human pupil dilation just might also be a wide range of variables.

I'm 41 and have been measured in less than total darkness as having pupils that were *shrinking* down to 6.5mm because the opto tech had to shine a white light in my eyes to get even that measurement. There are plenty more examples cataloged out there in webspace of a variety of folks who haven't found the age to pupil size correlation going exactly as planned.

This is a whole subject that practically demands a separate thread. I'll attempt to address it in detail at some later time.

Cheers,
Mike Swaim

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18" Starsplitter II f/4.5
8" Hardin Dob f/6
C5 workhorse mini SCT f/10 or f/6.3
70mm TV Ranger dual purpose birding/astro
77mm Leica Televid APO
16x70 Fujinons on UA Deluxe Mt.
12x50 Nikon SE
8x30 Nikon E2s
and many others