Thotmosis
Well-known member
What a pleasant suprise when i just checked the mailbox. There is a lot of interest for this book with the usual suspects.
I am sure there are also people who will read a book and understand and remember what they read for a long time, but that category has 0% in the above statistics. Also not all categories are mutually exclusive, but the percentages add up to 100%. As Mark Twain wrote: "lies, damned lies, and statistics."So there seem to be a number of forum members who have ordered or will or may order the book.
But is that enough to improve the quality of our bino discussions?
Statistically, of those people who order a book,
- 14% put it in their bookshelf without opening it
- 27% put it in their bookshelf while claiming to have read it
- 32 % will superficially leaf through some chapters while listeing to the news before putting the book in their bookshelf
- 19.6% will read parts of the book but don‘t understand a word of what they have read
- 7.4% will read and understand but forget what they read within two weeks.
So which category are YOU in?
So there seem to be a number of forum members who have ordered or will or may order the book.
But is that enough to improve the quality of our bino discussions?
Statistically, of those people who order a book,
- 14% put it in their bookshelf without opening it
- 27% put it in their bookshelf while claiming to have read it
- 32 % will superficially leaf through some chapters while listeing to the news before putting the book in their bookshelf
- 19.6% will read parts of the book but don‘t understand a word of what they have read
- 7.4% will read and understand but forget what they read within two weeks.
So which category are YOU in?
Yes I do - and nobody can prove my „statistics“ wrongCanip is having some fun
I dare to question that claim: "your statistics" will be proven wrong when members of the BF will recite from memory facts from Holger's book they read (and understood) more than 2 weeks back. At least I hope so....Yes I do - and nobody can prove my „statistics“ wrong
(and you know that I wish your book all the success it deserves)
Holger, thanks for writing this book. I've purchased it today. Cheers!This is a great opportunity to get both books for little money
Thanks, Jean-Charles, for your heads up ....
Cheers,
Holger
I believe most individuals will concur with Holger's comments, albeit the range of binoculars obviously does not cover every current modern model e.g. GPO HDs, Opticron Aurora, Svbony SV202s, Adventure T WP porros, to name a few across the price ranges. (EII is now £700!)While waiting, 11 wisdoms:
All verry interesting.
Take a look at Wisdom no. 6 and Wisdom no. 9. It seems we can forget a lot of posts/debates about high-end binoculars.
I am not criticising Holger in any way, in fact I concur with his methodology, having used similar methods to select engineering designs, but what I believe is that the 'ROP' criteria matrix could be somewhat personal to Holger and might not fit each of our own criteria & relative weightings.
I agree .... Wisdom #8 applies in principle to the majority of products; it is choosing the 'ROP' criteria that place each of the respective products at their applicable point on the curve.I think that Wisdom #8 applies to a majority of binoculars users, birders or not. Hence the value of it.
I believe most individuals will concur with Holger's comments, albeit the range of binoculars obviously does not cover every current modern model e.g. GPO HDs, Opticron Aurora, Svbony SV202s, Adventure T WP porros, to name a few across the price ranges. (EII is now £700!)
The aspect I would "challenge" is Wisdom No 8: Plotting price vs 'Relative Optical Performance' is certainly a good idea and worthy of consideration as we all look at binoculars in this way.
However, the measure 'Relative Optical Performance' might (?) have a level of subjectivity and personal preferences applied.
If (big IF and I haven't looked !) this 'ROP' criteria is a list/matrix of weighted or unweighted criteria then each bin has been assigned a value for each of the chosen criteria. Maybe some are based on specs., or measured features e.g. size/weight. This methodology is totally fine; but for each of us this could be heavily influenced by personal preferences and experiences. Examples - I like flat field, not sensitive to CA, dislike excessive FC and prefer not wearing glasses with -7D myopia. Image stabilisation would have very high weighting.
A similar evaluation methodology is used by engineering designers when they have multiple designs and the organisation need to down-select the product options at 'design freeze', so that tooling and manufacture can then ramp-up.
The number of and list of each criteria, with their relative weightings is critical for the product to be a commercial & engineering success. Often it is picking and weighting 'apples vs oranges'.
In the binocular domain it could be FoV vs mass, centre sharpness vs edge sharpness, light transmission at 500nm vs 600nm, etc. .... what is the list of criteria, is it extensive enough and what is the weighting of each criteria in the 'ROP' matrix?
Maybe Holger has the matrix and weighting for each criteria in his book (or deeper on his website?) .... my copy of his book is in the post and I can check when received.
So, before I get lots of negative comments about the above ....... I am not criticising Holger in any way, in fact I concur with his methodology, having used similar methods to select engineering designs, but what I believe is that the 'ROP' criteria matrix could be somewhat personal to Holger and might not fit each of our own criteria & relative weightings.
This 'shoulder curve' reflects most products ... the sweet-spot is usually the items that fall in the mid point .... good performance for the price.
That was the EII at one time, but with price changes and new entrants, this graphic will change over time.
What I find interesting is that every time there is a new thread asking for " please recommend a bin....", that subjective suggestions are made often recommending underperforming bins, or overpriced bins for their performance. This is very obvious on BF as many 'like minded' individuals frequent the forum .... with perhaps some 'groupthink'.Any model that consistently gets mentioned in these sorts of wide scale rankings by organisations that know what’re doing and don’t have a vested interest in the result should give you models to consider, there maybe some features of each that you specifically care about… glare, eye relief, field of view, mechanics that would help identify which you might prefer. It could be fun to plot bino performance in a multi-dimensional space (how many parameters do you want to consider??), but as Holger notes it wouldn’t really add much.
Peter