Telescope Reviews: Bushnell H2O 8x42 porro -- brief comments

Sunday afternoon I went to a local sports and outdoors store (Academy) to look at their current binoculars selection. In the store I looked through a Nikon Action Extreme ATB 8x40, Pentax XCF 10x50, and Leupold 6x30. Then I went to look at the cheap binoculars, all of which are encased in sealed plastic containers. The store carries the Bushnell H2O porro, which KennyJ has mentioned in the past, and I decided to take one home. It was $75 including sales tax.

Specs (from the container and/or the binocular itself):

8x42
multicoated
BaK-4 prisms
center focus
17 mm eye relief
430 feet @ 1000 yards
143 meters @ 1000 meters
(= 8.2 degrees true field of view)
27.2 ounces
waterproof, fogproof
tripod adaptable
model 13-2408C
made in Philippines

It has fast screw-up eyecups and a click-stop right-diopter adjustment. It's rubber-armored. It came with a soft case, objective lenscaps and a loosely joined pair of lenscaps for the eyepieces, plus a thin strap and a lenscloth.

This is certainly a usable binocular. The view is not bad. I could see two of Jupiter's moons, from a residential area of the city (NELM maybe +4.0, maybe only +3.5). M31 was faint but there; M13 just barely. I could see eight Coathangar stars.

The biggest surprise for me is how much trouble I had trying to hold it steady. I think I have a less shakey image in my 12x60 44oz binocular. For sure it's more shakey than my Orion Ultraview 8x42 (R.I.P.). I think besides magnification and weight there's another factor involved in shaking, which has to do with the center of gravity or whatever is involved in how easy binoculars are to move in terms of "pitch" (as opposed to roll and yaw). It's something like the tilting point of a see-saw.

The exit pupils appear to be very slightly clipped, just a tiny bit.

This particular one has some sort of flaw somewhere in the optical path on the left side. Looking at Jupiter, there are two streaks at right angles to each other radiating away from the planet. Of course when I switched eyes (held it upside-down) the streaks pointed in the opposite directions. So I have to take this one back for an exchange. I can't see what's causing the streaks. It's not a terrible flaw, and it might be invisible in daylight, but it shouldn't be there.

A note on the Nikon -- in the store it seemed to me that without my eyeglasses, I could not quite reach focus with my left eye. I didn't care much for the feel of this one in my hands (kind of clunky or awkward somehow), while the Pentax felt very nice -- but it has inadequate (it seems to me) fold-down eyecups.

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Ed Cannon - Austin, Texas, USA

Bushnell H2O 8x42, Celestron Skymaster 12x60

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