Binoculars

[maby]

I bought my wife some 7x50 Optisan binos from Adec Marine at the Southampton Boat Show. £108, waterproof, compass and rangefinder. They have a lovely clear image and will hopefully stop her from warning me about every approaching boat regardless of distance!

Hmmm, as I understand it, the use of the range finder does require several steps including calculations, or reference tables - I would not expect any significant drop in false alarms...

 

[Montemar]

You are right of course but there is a circular slide rule gizmo that also acts as part of one of the lens caps. It only takes a couple of twiddles and providing you can guess at the height or width of the approaching cross channel ferry you can get a fairly good estimate. For a few copper's worth of plastic it is very good. No doubt other binos come with them as well.

 

[actionoptics]

Use tipex

I've always resisted the urge to get IS binos because my eyes are quite different from each other. Leaving aside a complex astigmatism and other delights my SPH numbers are R -1.00 and L -3.25.

What this means in bino-land is that if I adjust the binos to work when my vision has already been adjusted by contact lenses and then happen to be on a specs wearing day when I want to use the binos, I need to spend so long messing about adjusting my binos that the object needs to stay in one place for quite a while in order to be viewed at all.

Anyone got a good solution to this, other than wear lenses all the time which I can't because lenses with sufficient oxygen flow don't as yet exist for my prescription?

I've seen anumber of binoculars with white marks (Tipex works) on the adjustable eyepiece. You can have one mark for when wearing spectacles and another for contacts. You could even be really cool and have different colours. Marking the eyepiece also helps if someone else borrows your bino and sets a different position.

 

[benjenbav]

I've seen anumber of binoculars with white marks (Tipex works) on the adjustable eyepiece. You can have one mark for when wearing spectacles and another for contacts. You could even be really cool and have different colours. Marking the eyepiece also helps if someone else borrows your bino and sets a different position.

Thanks. That's a great idea.