Alexis, I hear what you are saying, but the roofer bias seems to be dying with our visitors. About 50% of the viewing here is done on platforms or in tents/buildings or blinds/hides, with knees or counter-tops available for elbow bracing. At different times of the year different birding events are occurring, but almost always at fixed distances around the 10-15 open acres visible from platforms, hides/blinds or buildings around our ranch. The Minox IFs roofers and Steiner IF porro binoculars are often used in these locales because they are focused once and then probably not focused again for long periods of time, but since viewing is done sitting down, porros dominate greatly (about 80%). I don't use the Minox bins myself but I do use the Steiner 8x30 with IF all the time in these situations and I usually don't touch the focus much. If I do, it's to see something quite close and then I don't touch the focus again for a while.
I am lucky that I never have a week with less than 15-20 hours of birding here, but regular visitors seem to do the same thing. The exception of course is hawk/eagle/harrier/turkey-vulture viewing as they patrol the skies. Then the focus is constantly changing. We have chaise longues for people here (although I see many people laying down on lawn-grass hillsides with steep inclines) and while there is a higher % of roofers used for this purpose, it's a weight consideration more than anything else.
Also on almost all but the oldest porro prism binoculars wehave found no "stiff focusing" issues in the extreme cold here and it's more of a concern how the bins handle with gloves. There are 2 spray materials we offer to prep bins that haven't been lubed in a while, and we have never had a case of a porro with internal focusing (like my well used Leupold fully waterproof 10x30 porros) that siezed up in the winter (even my 20 year old Zeiss Dekarems work great on super-cold winter days). Since gloved hands would have trouble turning a focusing wheel in winter if it stiffened up, we forewarn visitors about this problem.
Sometimes older binocs, not well maintained, will have stiff focusing, but it seems to happen to roofers and porros alike. It's really a maintenance issue not a design/materials issue. Also, in freezing weather the "double tube" designs of roofers are much more slippery with gloves (especially when cold and wet) compared to irregularly shaped porros. With most bins it is the way the focusing wheel handles that seems most significant and so sharper wheel ridges are helpful, as is an oversized focusing wheel. (Most of the birders who come here DON"T use IF bins in winter/late-fall due to the focusing difficulty with gloves and the need to change positions, but again Minox and Steiner bins are exceptions to this rule). When using most porros I find that one index or middle finger is in exactly the right location when holding the porros in their normal viewing position.
The problem with the strap mount is acknowledged, especially in older porro models. Today I was field testing a pair of Carson 10x50s trying to locate a new family of foxes. The Carsons have a strap hole out the top of the prism cover (as do Steiners). I find that many of the more recent porro designs like those 2, lay flat on the birder's chest. Leupold designs (we see allot of Leupolds here for some reason, maybe the "Hunting Heritage" name brand means something, [go figure??]) have the strap loops on either side of the bin. Given an interest by the public, it would be easy for manufacturers to use lightweight materials like magnesium or fiber reinforced polymers for body structures, and I have a number of marine binoculars that are porros and use internal center focus (as well as my Leupold 10x30s), so this is all pretty low tech now and would be easy to incorporate in a porro for birding.
The other part of the field testing today involved a 3.5 mile hike down a wooded hillside trail to the Missouri River. The river is pretty high but tame here. But the river's twists provide shallows for jillions of birds and many flood plain areas are ... now... flooded (big thunderstorms are rolling through tonight again). It's a really great area for shore birds especially around the migration times. NO ONE wears a binocular around their neck in any way shape or form on treks down wooded hillside military crest trails down to the Missouri River. The brush is not manicured and the Honey Locust tree branches will grab any kind of strap ever made, and will thoroughly destroy a foam or foam filled strap. There are a few rip-stop nylon covered padded straps that will withstand the constant clawing of brush but your bins will always be catching on something and throwing off your balance. The third or fourth time you fall you will carry your bins on-a-strap in your hand or backpack.
If you return, your bins be in a handy pocket, a belt pouch, fanny pack or on top of a monopod when trail trekking here. While the trail grades aren't steep there is about a 200-300 foot drop in altitude to the river from our hillcrest starting point, and it seems like more because of the nature of the up-and-down hilliness here. To the river and back takes 4 hours moving quickly if you spend one hour on the wetlands along the river. Everyone is really beat afterwards. Goats would find this a difficult walk.
But the sights are incredible. Deer travel in large groups along the erosion gully bottoms 50 feet below the hill's military crest where the walking trail heads down to the river. They easily leap obstacles that would stop hikers. Even noisy groups can startle large resting or foraging deer groups who try sleeping in the heat of the day. The forest dominates the strongly sloped hillsides down to the river. The viewing distances are usually pretty short in forests and brush and the light is subdued but brightly diffuse. It's dominated by the brown and green coloration of sunlight reflected off tree limbs, trunks and leaves. The binoculars I take are the small Leupold 10x30 porros, and the little Nikon 7x20s, Olympus 8x21s or Hensolt 6x18s. Sometimes I'll replace the 7x20s with Hensoldt DF 8x30s or Sharper Image 8x25s and then carry a third set of throw-away microbins like the Olympus 8x21s, or bulletproof minibins like the VOP 6x30s.
But anything I take has to fit into the pocket of a mesh vented vest made of rip-stop nylon, a fanny pack or a belt pouch. Bug spray, water, a first aid kit, cellphone and other essential things also have to come with me too. I wear a crushable nylon bucket hat with a chin strap to protect my head (it helps keep the ticks off your head when they fall on you from shaken tree branches) and I'll often use a monopod like a Leki too. I admit that many roof prism binoculars would fit into my pockets easily, while the choice of porros is more limited, but if waterproofing (or throwing destroyed bins away) wasn't a consideration, I likely would take Nikon 8x30 E2s, or any number of other fine porro bins. The wetlands are super-humid and you can easily drop a binocular into a creek flowing to the river, not to mention the river itself, so we use bins that can stand being dunked or thrown away without too much remorse.
The bird views available to 3-5 experienced quiet-tekking birders hiking down this trail are incredible. There is constant activity and it changes all year 'round. This is a major migratory flyway region so twice a year the most populous bird groups traversing the area can change every day or so. The migrations haven't started in full "flight" yet, but now the tanagers are pretty populous and the purple and house finches are around in the thousands. It's too hot to be out in direct sunlight so most of the birds are in the forested hillside cover during the late afternoon and early evening trekking times. They are often sleeping during the day out of the sight of hawks/harriers/eagles.
So maybe it's the environment here that makes roof prisms no better than porros, so the extra costs of high end roof prism models are not justifiable. Considering we have smallish 1-3 acre fields here lined with 50-100 foot tall walnut tree on the fence lines, or unmanaged forested hillside trails with substantial brush, running down to smallish river bend shallows on a major river that is totally tree lined in this area, or smallish open areas with platforms, buildings and blinds for viewing, there seems to be no advantage in having roofers instead of porros. When we all stop walking and sit on the trail itself, with our legs and feet bracing down the hill's slope off the trail, resting our elbows on our knees while we admire birds sitting or engaged in interesting behavior, what we view is rarely more than 50-100 feet away.
While some visitors bring the most expensive Swaro and Leica roofers to do viewing here, fewer and fewer seem to have them on treks due to the high damage rate. When you are sitting on a platform or in a hide/blind the distances to the birds is almost fixed and wide FOV or depth of field becomes most important and not focusing speed.
I am amazed that whenever I lend out one of my collection of wide angle porros, with fields wider than 10 degrees, I can pretty much count on an offer to buy them. The panoramic view of these bins and typically ultra-large eye lenses make for pretty exciting viewing whether the birder wears glasses or not (especially when you are 50-90 feet away from a field with 100 redwing blackbirds sitting atop 3-4 foot tall curly dock weed stalks 3 feet apart, and the birds are feuding with each other and displaying.) But I wouldn't have a collection of I sold any of those bins and I have no super or ultra wide view roofers in my collection.
I think the generally wider angles of view afforded by porros is also a reason why I am seeing more and more of them in the hands of really dedicated birders. And while binoculars are invaluable during the yearly species counts we participate in (only "counters" can come on those days, and we kind of .. "party" .. with the volunteers afterwards), allot of birders come here and use only their eyes or maybe only a small pair of 3x Beauford style eyeglass binoculars for their viewing all year 'round. There are a few birders who visit regularly who rarely use bins at all, even if they have great roofers in their pocket or pouch. They just love seeing the seasonal bird activities with their unaided eyes. So birding really doesn't require binoculars at all. AND there are those who see most of their views through camera lenses, or spotting scopes in hides/blinds perhaps trying to perfect the art of digiscoping.
But more than half of the visiting birders do use binoculars. I'd say that real novices almost all use porros because they are less expensive. For a while there were allot of acoompanying visitors (non-birders with birders) who brought little 7-10x by 20-23mm roofers that might have been nice for sporting events too. Many serious returning birders will move up to quality roofers like Nikon Monarchs or Sportsters, or house brand phase-coated bins from Gander Mountain, Cabelas or Bass Pro, because those companies have huge outfitting stores in the area. But an almost equal number trade in their first bins for Steiner, Leupold or Swift porros with bright sharp views and wide FOV. In fact I think the wider field of view on porros might be what is making some regular visitors bring high end porros more often than the Swaro or Leica roofers they leave at home. This may be way off, but since the typical bird activities here involve large groups of birds, the wider FOV on most porros makes viewing somehow more enjoyable than looking through a keyhole with most roofers.
I recently compared a Steiner Merlin 8.5x roofer bin with a Steiner Big Horn 9x porro while sitting with some friends in a tent/hide/blind. While the quality of the view was similar in sharpness, color correction and overall color balance, the wider FOV on the porro made watching much more enjoyable and the porro's view was brighter too. It's like the improvement you get looking through a widefield 30x eyepiece on a spotter vs a standard 30x eyepiece.
A wider FOV really adds enjoyment and that kind of panoramic "immersion" is easier to achieve with a porro. When some visitors come here with people they want to impress (like bosses who will have very expensive Swaros, Leicas, Nikons and Zeisses they hardly ever use), they often bring a similar roofer bins. But when they come just for the pleasure of it all, I often see them mostly with porros that have sharper wider views than their roofers. Birding has a "staus" factor like any activity and this might influence the purchase of many high end roofers. Or maybe not (as the recent buzz about the Bushnell Elite shows, because Bushnell is not a high status brand). I don't own the Bushnell Elite 8x43 so I can't comment on its viewing quality. I don't own the Zeiss FLs or Swaro SLCs or Leica Ultravids either. Although I've looked through all of these bins that visitors lend to me for 5 minutes, the views didn't shock me quality-wise, the way some porros have.
But I do have Kern/Arrau 8x30s, Zeiss Oberkochen 8x30s, Zeiss Jena Deltrintem 8x30s and Nikon E2 8x30s all of which are spectacularly good. I used some Swarovski 10x40 Habicht porros on a trip to Las Vegas this last Christmastime and they were stupendous too (too bad they seem to be discontinued now (get the Swaro 7x42 Habicht porro if you can, it is also incredible), but maybe Swaro stopped making this item because they think some Chinese maker will have a similar model just as good soon or maybe Steiner's Nighthawk or Big Horn porros were as good for half the price NOW).
Most of the best binocular images I've ever seen through bins were viewed through porros, and the handling ability of a porro, egonomics-wise has been researched pretty well for nearly 100 years, so it is POSSIBLE to make a birding-compatible porro. I've got some magnesium body ultra-wide porro bins that are a real joy to hold and use for hours, ANd they lay flat on my chest orjacket, so I take these to baseball games where bins with a narrow field of view would be pretty useless. I think that if a porro that is thoughtfully designed for birding, and a similar roofer, in the $1000 price range, are carefully compared, the porro will come out the winner.
I wonder how many sales Swarovski lost to themselves, when a full line dealer had a customer compare Swaro's 10x40 Habicht porro to Swaro's own 10x42 SLC at twice the price, and then preferred the porro. I'm sure that happens to Nikon all the time because I saw that was exactly the situation during the 8 years I sold Nikon binoculars. The same high-end retailers I worked with then, see the same thing happen now when the Nikon Se or E2 8x30/32s get compared to the LXs of similar magnification and objective size. In fact since the porro will almost always be about 3-5% brighter for a given magnification and objective size (and this IS noticible), the better (sharper, wider, brighter) view will help sell the high end Nikon porro vs Nikon's high end LX roofer, and the high end porro is likely less expensive too.
That's why Nikon makes many very good porros, and when the trendiness of roofers wears off, Zeiss, Leica and Swarovski might broaden their line-ups too, in much the same way as Steiner has. Since I've seen trends come and go in 30 years of birding, I think that there will be a time when porros are back in vogue. I've always preferred porros to roofers and probably always will, because I appreciate the sharper, wider, brighter view possible with the best porros and I can cope with the porro's ergonomics (which are improving all the time anyway). As far as taking knocks are concerned the reason most military bins are porros is because this is an easier system to make bulletproof compared to roofers. So if an ergonomically well designed porro, that is fully waterproof with internal focusing (like the Leupold 10x30) is dramatically less expensive than let's say a Nikon Monarch, and the view through the Leupold is brighter, wider and as sharp or sharper, what possible reason is there to buy a roofer for the same price? If cost is no object then it will easily be possible to make a porro that is the same weight and balance as the best roofers, with a wider, sharper, brighter view, the same strap/hanging characteristics, with a conveniently located focusing wheel, and probably for allot less money. The only differences then will be predjudice and the wider porro shape vs the double tube roofer shape.
That's why the Cornell tests seemed so narrow and trend/status conscious, instead of being a more scientific test with available porros in the high end price bracket, NEVER using windows to view through (if it's bitter cold in winter then schedule the test for springtime or suck it up, but don't make claims about bins "tested" by looking through a pane of highly variable NON-optical glass). To me the test was very incomplete and almost a joke done by reviewers who seemed desperate for sponsorship funding/equipment, and who didn't want to spend much time outdoors on the test dates. They could just as easily have said, "We recommend you buy the most expensive binocular each manufacturer makes in each of the following price ranges, etc., because it's too cold for us to go outside." Then the credibility of their testing would have been about the same or higher than it was doing it the way they did. In the winter we use optical glass windows in some of our buildings so spotter users can watch while keeping out the cold. These windows are normally used in undersea camera housings, although we have a few multicoated 120mm photographic filters we use as windows too. If we can find a way to do this then how is it that a supposedly knowledgable group at a major university tries to pass off testing/viewing through NON-optical glass as being meaningful?
Alexis Powell said:
ksbird/foxranch,
Yes, I put the Cornell bino test articles in the same category as their authoritative rediscovery of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. The bino article does have some good general info in it, though the bias against porros is lamentable, and it certainly isn't anything close to a comprehensive test of all the best birding binos on the market. I'm no lover of the current crop of low-end roofs, with their mediocre (but arguably functional) optics and constricted 330 ft (in the case of the 8x models) fields of view (glad to see some of the newest low/mid priced models are designed to have wider fields). Given the quality/functionality of so many of today's bino models for birding, most casual buyers will be satisfied by purchasing one of Cornell's picks and never know how much nicer optics can be (for the same price or less). I'm always amazed at how biased so many consumers are against porros, a bias that is expressed as raw prejudice or disguised by insisting on full waterproofing. The Cornell article not only does nothing to better educate buyers about the merits of porros, it reinforces their negative biases.
From your description of the ranch visitors that you are helping, it sounds as though they are fairly casual birders (birdwatchers, in the modern connotation), but that they have the money and desire to buy "the best." Their mistake is in thinking that the best birding bino is the bino with the best optics. There are plenty of binos with excellent optics, but that doesn't make them good for birding. For example, binos with individual focus oculars can have stunning optics and can be used for watching feeders, distant ducks, and raptors, but they don't deserve to be called birding binos. The best birding binos have superb optics, but just as importantly, their ergonomics and design allow the user to efficiently find and focus on birds that are popping in and out of view at different distances in environments that are physically and visually complicated (mixture of shadows and bright light), such as when watching warblers in the woods, sparrows in brushy/grassy places, or seabirds alternately swooping/landing near/far to a pitching boat. Furthermore, since they will often be worn all day, day after day in the course of hiking or other activities (photography, tourism), the best models hang comfortably/unobtrusively and can take the occasional knock. Your ranch visitors should certainly spend the time to find binos that they find optically satisfying, but THEN they should spend even MORE time testing/considering the handling properties of their candidate purchases--how quickly they can pop them up to their eyes, focus near (8ft) to far (infinity), and use them in awkward positions, such as when leaning out a car window or looking up into forest trees.
In my experience, top-end roofs are generally superior as birding binoculars. To reiterate/quote myself from my earlier reply, "The point of getting a high-end roof is not to have better optics, but rather to have a binocular that is (for many people) ergonomically superior, more compact (but usually not any lighter in weight), more shock resistant, and with a center-focus that is usually internal (not as subject to mechanical damage), smooth operating over an extreme range of temperatures, and which allows for extremely close focusing with good left/right field overlap (important for us bird/butterfly enthusiasts)."
For some reason that utterly baffles me, most porros are lubricated with a grease that stiffens considerably in cold temps (it isn't something inherent to the external focus design--my Zeiss 7x42 Classic, which have external focus, hardly stiffen at all, even at -20F), a behavior that limits their utility for birding for me. Also, the strap attachments on most porros are located so that the bino hangs at an angle, rather than flat against my body (a small, but for me, very significant handling issue). I love the optics of my Nikon 8x32 SE (I don't have any problems with blackout, reported by others), but I don't use them for birding for just these reasons. Even though I have large hands, I still find that most porros force me to shift my hand position for focusing to a position that is not as stable for holding--not good in birding situations where the focus is being adjusted almost continuously.
I'd advise your visitors who prefer the handling properties of and can afford the best roofs not to worry about the fact that they cost $1000+ more than porros that are their equal (or slight superior) optically. Sure, the cost difference is extreme, but this is pretty much a universal when it comes to luxury consumer products, be they watches, fishing rods, bicycles, or cars. Lots of people happily pour a huge percentage of their income into cars/trucks/SUVs for example, even though a smaller/cheaper vehicle would meet their transportation needs (I drive a Honda Civic hatchback that I bought used for $2800, is inexpensive to maintain, gets 36 mpg average on the highway, and will last the car equivalent of forever. With the addition of a large Yakima car-top box on a roof rack, I can fit enough food, water, and gear for myself, wife and two kids to take long camping/road trips. We happily drive most roads for which many consider 4WD necessary, and for the limited times that we might need a high clearance vehicle, we can rent.).
best wishes,
AP
