Excellent scope; great eye relief - Hawke Sport Optics Endurance ED 13-39x50mm Spotting Scope

I recently bought a Hawke Endurance HD 13-39x50 from OpticsPlanet. I have some experience using a Pentax 65mm scope with Vixen Lanthanum eyepiece, so I was expecting the Hawke to be kind of mediocre compared to the Pentax, but worth it for the size tradeoff.

I have used it twice now and like it better than I thought I would. It is sharp, with plenty of contrast and good chromatic aberation control. The thing that most impresses me is the eye relief. It starts out great at 13mm, easily what the specs say (20mm), but like most eyepieces, you start to lose some as you zoom in, but it stays very good and more than acceptable. But the surprising thing to me is that it IMPROVES after about 20mm, so that by the time you are at about 26mm it's just about as good as it was at 13mm, and it stays that way all the way out to 39mm. So essentially I can see the entire field of view for the entire zoom range.

The focusing is great and the fine-tune knob helps a lot at higher magnification. My only complaint is that the case doesn't fit perfectly - the eyepiece part of it is not quite large enough to fully secure it with the velcro tabs on the top and bottom at the same time. I suppose this is because they do change eyepieces with these models (the previous version had a 12-36 eyepiece, I think).

So, this scope is excellent for the money and I am VERY pleased with it. Even in cases where size isn't much of a factor (e.g. I won't be carrying it very far), I think I won't have any particular reason to use the Pentax instead.