Review for Celestron Ultima 65 Spotting Scope Angled, 18-55x65mm Zoom 52248

Author: Renan Oliveira , Biologist/Ornithologist, from Londrina on May 13, 2011
Pros:  Accuracy of focus
Cons:  Small angle of view
Would recommend:  yes

Renan Oliveira wrote:

I bough this scope to replace my broken Yukon Firefall 12-36x50. I got quite surprised for the quality of the optics, and to the removable Eyepiece, that is safer to carry aroung when not using the Scope. My old Yukon scope had it eyepiece broken (I always though that it was too hard to change the zoom) and the Zoom range stucked in the maximum. Since there's no separate eyepiece to sell I bought this Celestron. First thing I did was putting both scopes pointing to the same spot from my window, and I realized that the Yukon was amazing, and the definition was quite equal to the Celestron, but the colors in the Celestron were more real, and the image in Yukon was a little "warmer". The Celestron by the way is harder to find the subject, cause it have a smaller field of view than the Yukon. To surpass this problem you can use the little aim tube on the side of the Celestron to take your scope near to the "target" and then look through the Eyepiece. This Celestron Ultima is quite a bargain for it's quality, the only thing that I recomend is to use it's zoom only until 35x or maybe 40x, above it the image gets darker and in some light conditions it's worthless. By the way, there's no big difference in real life using 35x or 55x thinking about the magnification. The bird (I'm ornithologist) doesn't look much closer when using above 35x Zoom. I already compared it to my friends Kowa TSN-601 using a 30x Eyepiece, and the magnification of 24x in Celestron was very similar to Kowa's 30x field of view. The image in Kowa is a little brighter, specially in dusk conditions, but I still don't see any vantage in paying more than 4 times the price of a Celestron to buy a Kowa and it's Eyepiece. The image in Celestron is about 85% of the quality, so why should you pay 4 times more? Hope I can help new costumers! Bye!