BuckRimfire from United States, WA Public Profile

Just received this, so only a first impression (I looked at a hummingbird in my back yard and the roof of my house), but for under $100, it will do fine.

There is no eye cup around the ocular lens, just a flat rubbery surface. That's great if you wear glasses; if not you might miss the eye cup. The eye relief is OK but not generous: at 10x is enough that my glasses just barely didn't touch the eyepiece. At 20x, my glasses are pressed against the eyepiece to see the entire field.

The little included tripod is not bad. Azimuth friction (panning) doesn't seem to be adjustable, but out of the box it was just right: smooth but not too loose. Hope it won't loosen up too fast. The elevation adjustment has a nice bit of fluidity, not just tight or loose like some small tripods I've used, so you can scan up and down without needing to keep your hand on it at all times.

The helical focuser is fairly stiff to turn but not so much that the tripod shook when adjusting the focus. The image is just slightly "soft." I could never get what looked like *perfect* focus. If the scope cost much more, I might complain, but for this price it is acceptable.

Closest focal distance is about 18 feet at both 10x and 20x. The zoom is not quite parfocal: after focusing at 10x, zooming to 20x required a very small focal adjustment.

At 10x, the image was bright, but at 20x it became somewhat dim. This is the smallest spotting scope I've ever used, so I don't know if that is inevitable with a

Great stove! Worth the extra few bucks and grams over typical butane stoves. Folds pretty small, very stable for cooking with minimal tendency to tip and spill. Good simmer and good wind-resistance, although you should have a wind deflector for high wind, as with any stove that doesn't actually lock the burner onto the bottom of the pot.

Can't be used with the butane cartridge upside down, so at really low temperatures (not sure how low) this will start to limit the performance.

Very good image quality, fairly compact and light weight. At this price point, you could probably get as good an image from a 7x35 porro prism binocular, but they would be much bigger.

To get close to this size in a binocular, you'd have to choose a tiny roof-prism binocular that, at this price, would lack phase-correction on the prisms and would therefore have crummy image quality. No one should EVER buy a non-phase-corrected roof prism! The micro-roofs would also have a tiny exit-pupil, which makes them less easy to look in if you're, say, on a boat that's moving around...

I looked at a sharp-edged dark object against a bright white cloud background and could see almost no chromatic aberration along the edge of the object. Just a touch of gold color, which you'd never notice unless you were specifically trying to judge the CA.

Eyepiece design seems pretty good: I focused on something in the center then panned that object toward the edge of the field of view, and it stayed pretty sharp at least half way out. 2/3 of the way to the edge, I was able to refocus somewhat, so some of the loss of sharpness was focal plane curvature, not other errors. I haven't looked at the stars at night yet to judge coma, but my bet is that the outer parts of the field will have the stars looking pretty wonky. There is just a tiny bit of pincushion distortion at the edge of the field, but not enough to give a weird feeling of things moving as you pan that I've seen in some optics. So,

I've had a bunch of different binoculars, including Canon's fantastic 15 x 50 image stabilized (so, I've seen some fine bins), and some similarly sized and priced Bushnells that I got a dozen years ago. These Diamondbacks are the best <$200 roof prism binoculars I've seen.

I bought a pair of these because my Bushnell 8 x 32 are OK but not great, and are heavy for their size, while these are significantly lighter. I liked them so much that I immediately ordered two more pairs with 3-day shipping so every member of the family could have a pair on the vacation we were about to leave for!

Image sharpness is very good for a small binocular. One thing that stands out is that you can easily see that there is an exact position of the focus wheel that is best. On my Bushnells, there is a small range of focus adjustment that does not seem to get better or worse, a sign of a bit less precision in the optical design.

Sharpness toward the edge of the field of view is also pretty good. Not quite as good as in the center, but it doesn't get really soft except in the last 20-25% of the radius. You'd have to pay a lot more than this to do much better in that department.

Close focus is very good. I can focus on my toes!

The only flaw in these that I can see is that they are a bit less resistant to stray light causing glare than some other binoculars I have. When you are facing toward the sun (even a fairly large angle from the sun like 50 degrees) there will be some areas of glare

I bought a pair of these for my daughter a few years ago, and liked them so much that I bought another pair as a gift to her friend. They are not as compact as a similar sized roof prism design, but at this price, I don't think you can get a roof prism with phase-correction, which is a must-have feature for me. Porro prisms need no phase correction.

The image is very good. It gets a bit soft in the outer half of the field of view, but the other pair of porro binos I have that were about the same price are noticeably worse.

Internal baffling and blackening of the tubes is decent: when facing the sun, the image is not badly washed out with internal reflections. I've seen cheaper binos in which internal reflections made them almost unusable when facing the sun.

Light and comfortable to carry. The 6x power is nice if you have shaky hands: although the image is smaller, it's steadier. Not a bad trade-off. It also gives a bigger exit pupil, which is a little easier to find as you raise them to your eyes.

On paper, the close-focus distance is not great, but they seem to work closer than advertised. Probably another effect of the low power, which allows greater depth of field.

Twist-up eyecups are good with glasses.