I had a Leupold Cascade 8x42 on spec, but decided to return it. The owner had about five pairs of these, that's how much he apparently liked them.
Ergonomically, they were the most comfortable binoculars I've ever held in my hands. They seem to be "custom fit". If you could find a photo of the engineer who designed these, his hands probably look like mine, which would be fairly large for a Japanese designer.
In addition to the "glove-on-hand" fit, the extra padding on the bottom of the prism housing where my thumbs rested was a nice feature since it provided good support and kept my thumbs from tiring quickly. With some porro designs, such as the Fuji FMT-SX series, I find the rounded prism housing on the underside fatigue my thumbs by not giving a flat support like the Cascades or CZJ Octarem.
The rubber armoring looked attractive and provided a comfortable and positive gripping surface. So high marks for the ergos.
The diopter wheel is another matter. It's an on-the-focuser design that pulls out from the focuser to adjust. The flat wheel is made of plastic, with spiny tines sticking out from the wheel. Not very comfortable and hard to turn on my sample. If you have good focus accommodation and can "set and forget," it won't be a big deal, but if you have to adjust the diopter for various distances like I do, you might find it inconvenient.
The eyecups were a good fit for this "socket crammer" due to their narrow diameter, which brings me to the bins' Achilles Heel, IMO.
The 6.4* FOV felt like looking through a port hole due to the great amount of black space around the view. Even the port hole in my cabin on the QE II gave a wider FOV.
I was actually on the QE II in 1983 after it returned from a tour of duty during the Falkland War.
I felt like Porky Pig in the variant ending of the Warner Bros. cartoons where the iris on the credits closes and he puts his pig feet in the hole and squeezes it opens it to deliver his signature sign off. I wanted to do that with the Cascades FOV.
I recently tried a Pentax 8x36 NV roof, which has a 6.5* FOV, and surprisingly, there was hardly any black space around the view. It didn't seem cramped like the Cascades. Only .1* difference. Go figure!
The Cascades focuser took two fingers to turn. I understand that not all samples have this much friction, but mine did, and it didn't get looser with use, because there were two high spots under the focuser that caused the problem (poor manufacturing QC, and it was Made in Japan! Go figure again!).
My final pet peeve was the overlapping barrel circles. Maybe it was the long close focus, I don't know, but for some reason, even at longer distances than close focus, I saw barrel shadows, which you typically get with porros at close focus although I tried a Celestron 8x42 Regal LX that exhibited this same issue.
The views were sharp but not exceptional. Bump this up a notch or two in performance and make a smoother focuser, a thicker rubber coated - ribbed - diopter wheel, and increase the FOV to 7.5*, give the views with a bit more "pop" (maybe better coatings/glass?), and Leupold might have a best seller.
However, due to the lack of interest in porros these days created by the Cambrian Roof Explosion and the Mysterious Roof Mystique, the company probably felt it wasn't worth putting a lot of money into designing this bin so they did a great job on the ergonomics and a ho-hum job on the rest.
But I think Leupold missed a golden opportunity here. Given the dearth of quality CF porros, why not think out of the box and make a high quality porro? Even if most people prefer roofs these days, there are enough diehard porromaniacs like myself willing to shell over $600-$700 for a high quality 8x42 Japanese-made porro that could be the long awaited big brother of the 8x32 SE.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBzJGckMYO4
