I had Leica Apo Televid 82 (for birding) about seven years before I got Kowa 883, so here are my thoughts about this scope:
My Televid 82 sample had some rather bad aberrations (mainly spherical aberration, some astigmatism) and when compared directly to my current (selected sample) Kowa, it had somewhat softer and less contrast image quality (and that was the reason I switched to Kowa 883). Was it worse than other brands same aperture scopes? Many times Televid 82 was equally sharp or even sharper than other randomly selected scopes from Kowa, Meopta or Zeiss @50x since the same sample variation is upon every brand (with some brands [Nikon, Swaroski] there may be better average quality and higher probability to get a good sample/avoid lemons). If you are not familiar with star testing scopes, I strongly suggest to learn before buying Leica (or in fact any other brand scope...).
Other than optical aberrations, my Televid + 25-50x zoom was a great scope, I liked it very much. View through the zoom was very wide angle and comfortable also with glasses on, there was plenty of eye relief. There may be some kidney beaning if pupil is too close to the eyelens but its easy cope with the adjustable eyecup. The dual focussing system was one of the best in my opinion, it's maybe not the smoothest possible but the slow focus is slow enough and it is easy and precise to focus at the highest mag. Image is quite bright and colours are very natural, there is some quite obvious lateral chromatic aberration but the center field is very clean and since the view was so wide, at least I wasn't bothered about some CA, but of course someone else could be. If I remember correct, the zoom had some pincushion distortion at highest mag. but I wasn't bothered with that either.
The stay on case is one of the best I have used, very rugged and functional. Only problem was that the sun shade was quite tight to pull out.
Mechanically the only weak point I found was the eyecup, which broke twice, since there was too thin plastic parts inside the eyecup. It may have been fixed with newer samples (mine was bought 2012 or something). The scope rubber casing had some quite strong plasticky smell, I haven't noticed similar with other scopes I have tested. For a 82 mm scope, Televid was quite heavy.
I also had the 1.8x extender but since the scope itself had optical aberrations, it wasn't very usable at highest mags.; it offered more resolution power maybe to about 70x or something like that (maximum available was 90x).
So if you manage to find a good sample of Apo Televid 82, I think you will have an excellent scope if you like wideangle views and 50x max mag. is enough (unless using the extender).
Regards, Juhani
