WolfSoul from United States, AZ Public Profile

I use binoculars for bird and wildlife watching. I compared the GPO Passion ED 10X42s in the field and in store against several competitors, including Athlon Optics Cronus Gen II UHD 10X42, Bushnell Legend Ultra HD 10X42, Kowa BD II XD 10x42, Zeiss Conquest ED (in store only) and the pair of Nikon Monarch HG 10X30s and Vanguard Endeavor ED II 10X42s that I already owned. I watched a very thorough YouTube video that compared the Athlon Cronus, GPO Passion EDs and Kowa BD IIs, and they ranked them in that order optically (the review included many others as well). I disagree, I found the GPOs to be very slightly superior to the Athlons, though there were certain times when the Athlons seemed very slightly better. Optically, I'd say you can't go wrong with either one. The Athlons are larger and heavier than the GPOs, which is ultimately what pushed me towards the GPOs. The biggest thing weighing against the GPOs to me was the fairly small amount of eye relief (just 15mm). They work for me, but just barely, and I think they would work better for me with another couple mm of eye relief. So for me, low eye relief is the biggest miss on these binoculars. I also don't care for either the eye piece covers or the objective lens covers. I swapped both out for lens covers that I had from other pairs of binoculars since these are now my primary binoculars. I should add that the first pair of GPOs that I ordered had a stiff spot in the focusing wheel, so I returned them for another pair tha

This is an odd spotting scope to review. I was very impressed with the optical quality of the scope, which compared surprisingly favorably to a much more expensive Kowa TSN-553 Prominar that I also bought for birding and wildlife watching. I had hoped that the Endurance would be close enough to the Kowa that I could save a bunch of money and keep the Hawke. The Kowa beat the Hawke in a few primary areas during my fairly brief testing. The Kowa revealed a little more detail in dark areas in otherwise good light. The Kowa handled backlighting much better. The Hawke also exhibited a little bit of chromatic aberration under some (but few) circumstances.

If it came down to just the optical quality, I would have kept the Hawke based on the significantly lower price. But . . . There were issues beyond the surprisingly minor differences in image quality. The first issue doesn't sound like a big deal, but the view-through case doesn't fit very well, to the point where the opening for the focus knob was not in the right place and the knob was half covered by the case. This is really annoying and kind of like an amateur hour type manufacturing flaw. The bigger issue, and the main reason I returned the Hawke, is that when turning the eyepiece to zoom, the eyepiece could continue to be turned beyond the stop for the end of the zoom range. I found this lack of quality to be concerning enough that I decided to return the Hawke and keep the Kowa. Even though the Hawke has a lifetime replace