Thread 'Hello from South Korea!'
Hello from South Korea!
As I'm doing binocular review continuously and gaining some influence over South Korean binocular society,
Zeiss main distributor of South Korea lend me SFL 8x40 and 10x40 for review. As it was first introduced 2023 jan in Korea, I was the first Korean to use SFL.
the 30mm SFL is not available in Korea yet.
(I'm not used to writh in English at foreign domain... so I have to right much shorter (about 30~40%) then ones I wrote is Korean forum.
but I'll try my best to summarize my feeling about it.)
significantly smaller in both length and width compared with SF 42mm (about 150g lighter too)
Pros :
1. highest color fidelity in market. (better than swaro el/ nl, zeiss ht, nikon edg, fujinon hc, steiner nighthunter and more.)
2. most pleasing agronomic in Zeiss binos.
short, light, easiest focusing due to short width, most comfortable eyecups in zeiss.
3. close focus 1.3m
4. very good stray light suppression.
even slightly better than victory ht/ sf
Cons :
It's price is closer to victories than conquest.
but It's overall image quality is closer to conquest than victory.
It has the name 'victory' on it, but it seems it's more evenly matched with conquest.
central sharpness is almost same as conquest and edge sharpness (about 85%) is smilar too.
CA control is significantly better than conquest but worse then victory sf (especially at the edges.)
color fidelity is over one step more higher in SFL (conqust color tends to be yellow - green. and 32mm has more green coloring than 42)
I think SFL is not a victory level, closer to 'Reinforced Conquest'
to summarize.
Zeiss SFL will be highly innovative to birders.
It's pros, the high color fidelity, stray light control, close focus, good agronomic, compact and lightweight is all the spec birders need.
It is very convenient for me that if I go serious birding, I'm thinking obut taking this along...
but for the optic purists, It's optic quality doesn't seem to be fitted to 'victory' name.
In korea, It is about a same price with Swarovski EL. so It is more obvious to go buy EL because EL's image quality is still a step over then SFL.
