Nikon Sportstar Zoom 8-24x25 Black binocular Sportstar Zoom 8-24x25 Black, 8x, 2.5 cm, Black, 305 g

Product Information

The focusing mechanism is geared so that it takes a full 2 and 1/4 turns to go from infinity to it's minimum focusing distance of 13.1ft (4m).What this means is that focusing from near to far (or vise versa) takes a little longer than ones that take less turns, but it does have the slight advantage of making fine tuning your focus just that bit easier and more accurate. I think Nikon have got this about right with these as it really helps you to get the correct focus when you have the magnification at the higher settings like it's maximum of 24x. The lenses on these Nikon EagleView Zooms are multilayer-coated. What this means is that they have received multiple layers of anti-reflective coatings which helps to increase light transmission, for a brighter image and therefore better low light performance. This is good, but it would have been even better if they had been fully-multi coated, which would mean that they had multiple layers of anti-reflective coatings on all air to glass surfaces and not just some of them as these are. To see this in action, you can hold these binoculars up at arm's length and look at the eyepiece lenses, where you can clearly see the circle of light in the eyepieces, this represents the exit pupil. As you increase the magnification you can actually see this circle of light in each eyepiece getting smaller and smaller - see my series of photos below that I took to demonstrate this: With these Nikon binoculars, the minimum distance that you can focus on an object is a 4 meters (13.1ft) away, which once again is not great and quite a bit further than the best. I consider anything under 6ft to be very good. So if you are looking for a compact binocular specifically for things like observing butterflies then I do not recommend getting these. Rather take a look at these close focusing binoculars. Optics-wise they use premium glass (Schott HT) for the roof prisms with phase-correcting coating P40 and HighLux-System HLS. This makes for a pin-sharp image without the loss of contrast that cheaper roof prisms can suffer from. Lenses have reliable HDC Plus-multicoating and AquaDura lens coating for maximum protection, while anti-reflective coatings make for great low-light capabilities.

The twist-up eyecups look to be made from a very hard plastic that have a very thin rubber coating on them. The ocular lens has a diameter of 11mm and the eyecup has an external diameter of 37mm, which are both considerably smaller than what you find on most full sized binoculars, but is about average for a compact. This smaller size and very thin rubber covering mean that they are not the most comfortable eyecups that I have ever used, but any discomfort is only really noticeable when you push them quite firmly against your face. These EagleView Zooms come with a fairly disappointing 13mm of eye-relief, which may be something to keep in mind if you want to use your optics whilst wearing glasses. Ideally and to be sure that you have enough distance to play with to enable you to see the full field of view without any vignetting when using your glasses most experts recommend that you should look for binoculars that have an eye relief of about 16mm or more. In most cases an eye relief of 14 to 15mm is adequate for most people who wear eyeglasses to be comfortable, so 13mm is a little on the short side. Most non-eyeglass wearers will just use the eyecups in the fully extended position. At 16x Magnification:When you increase their magnification to 16x their Exit Pupil reduces to 1.56 (25/16) which means that even less light will be getting to your eyes.

Slightly more manageable as an option for birders is the retro-looking Celestron Up Close G2 10-30x50 binocular, though it’s still heavy compared with what we have here due to that extra zoom power and larger objective lens. If weight is an issue, a zoom monocular is another alternative. Here Nikon’s arch-rival Canon provides one in its PowerShot Zoom Monocular, on which a minimum 100mm focus setting is adjustable to a 800mm equivalent. It can even capture stills and videos to microSD card too, though requires a battery to power it.

Below is a table comparing this Nikon EagleView Zoom with a selection of other compact binoculars. The very top of the range Swarovski 8x20B compact binoculars as well as a few others like the Pentax 9x28 DCF, Minox 10x25 BV BRW's, Kowa 8x25 BD and the Steiner 8.5x26 Wildlife Pro. Whilst I would not expect a low cost binocular like these to have the same build quality as a top of the range pair that costs ten times as much, but I still want them to be tough enough to handle most normal bumps and scrapes and still want them to feel like you have a good quality optical instrument in your hands and not just a toy. But other than these minor points, I would say that as you would expect of any Nikon product, they look pretty well made and considering that they have a plastic shell, they still feel fairly solid and robust and in terms of build quality are as good as any compact porro prisms found in this price range. As you would expect, keeping the image nice and still becomes harder and harder as you increase the magnification settings. At 24x I was able to the image still enough to take in all the details of what I was looking, but I had to concentrate on staying very still as even the smallest movement has a big impact on the amount of image shake. This is fine for short bursts, when you just want to take in a bit of detail, but is definitely not something that you would want to do over longer periods.When set to a magnification level of 8x, their field of view is 80m at 100m / 240ft at 1000 yards (4.6°) - which, for a what at this setting effectively an 8x25 binocular is not very good. To put this into context, the Steiner 8.5x26 Wildlife Pro has a FOV of 333ft at 1000 yards and the Kowa 8x25 BD has a FOV of 331ft at 1000 yards and even the Minox 10x25 BV BRW which has a magnification of 10x has a FOV of 290ft at 1000 yards.