I'm baaack! Reports of my death or confinement in a mental ward were only figuratively correct.
What I'm going to do for the time being is to mirror selected comments I've made elsewhere, starting now.
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Ode to Old Binoculars
I got these binocs Thurs. Old and with haze on prisms. Some corrosion from being sweated and spat on at football games. Go Hogs stickers on the case. Came from Arkansas. $14+ incl shipping. Wider angle by a degree from my other 7 X 35s claiming to be wide angle.
So I expected wide angle right? And out in the backyard that's how they looked. Less coated than my go-to Minolta or Nikon binocs but sharp, and wide, easy to follow flocks of birds in flight or to see constellations. But yesterday I took them out to the park. Wow. Never expected that depth of field. Could see ducks 200 ft out and the roadway a quarter mile beyond, all perfectly sharp and magnified. Changes perspective by a lot, some landscape painters paint that way, as though the world is a bowl.
The problem at football games is that you'd see the spectators in the opposite stand big and sharp at 7X and not just the players on the field and it would be distracting. You'd see them all at the same time! For nature that's perfect. Looking for wildlife, need a big deep field of view. Like to try them on mountain ranges.
Somehow it seems different from camera lenses, where wide angle lenses shrink objects far off. My impression -- and I need to test them more -- is that they act a little like telephoto lenses in making distant things look close, but have the wide field of a wide angle lens. How'd they do that? Nippon magic?
Optics by Toei Kogaku [stamped J-B4 on the front bridge], and marketed under different brands back in, I guess the 50s into the 70s. The scuttlebut in optics forums was that these are special and that Toei optics are special and so it seems. A couple on eBay now in better shape, but at $25-50.
Gonna look for a more extreme wide angle, say 11-13 deg.
Moral? Don't knock old optics. Some of those little unknown companies that have disappeared used elves and wizardry.
