Chuck, While I was on the USS Constellation (Aircraft Carrier)last fall traveling from Pearl Harbor to Hawaii, I noticed they had several pair of 4" binoculars on Vultutre' Row. Now my opinion is that binoculars are a waste of money - no use paying for the extra set of optics for redundancy, I decided to try them out one clear evening. To my amazement they did not work very well. I had a very difficult time finding even the brightest things such as M6 and M7. When I did find them they were VERY dim. Even looking at the other ships in the convoy, I couldn't see them very well at night. The next day I looked carefully at them. They had partially aluminized objectives! I am still wrestling with why they would want big binos like that and then cut the light gathering power down by partially aluminizing the lenses. BTW, I always wait for folks to get their binos out of alignment. They suddenly become very inexpensive to purchase, and once I cut them in half, they perform well (for my purposes) without the extra weight of the other half. I am interested in attending Binopaloza. Are you going to publish a map or instructions for the site? Brent --- Chuck Hards <chuckhards@yahoo.com> wrote:
Jim Stitley wrote:
Hey Chuck,
"What's up with those big Fujinons- $16,500? Are you kidding?
OOF! These are obviously for people with more money than brains!
Unless the objectives are Flourite triplets, this is clealy a case of All The Traffic Will Bear. They must make them one at a time, by Gnomes in the Black Forest!
You could build a Newtonian binocular with much better high-magnification imagery, twice the aperture, better color, and for 1/10th the cost!
While I'm sure a market exists for such things (aside from battleships), I'd have to win the lottery before I even looked at the ad!
Chuck
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