Binos for a high prescription.

[puddleglum]

Hi all,

I am extremely nearsighted (-10.5 and -11 for anyone who knows that that means), and also have a decent astigmatism, and optometrists haven't found any contacts that work for me. I always wear glasses but, thankfully, I am just barely correctable to 20/20. I have "ultrathin" or "featherweight" lens material, but they still are very thick in my prescription. They also need a few different coatings. All this means bit of light is getting blocked by my glasses. Due to my eye shape, I have a lot of floaters which, for those who are not familiar, are little fibers in the eye that move around as I move my eyes. They appear as transparent shadowy little strands, which can effectively "darken" my vision a little bit.

I need a pair of binos for whitetail hunting in eastern WI. My understanding is eye relief is important for glasses wearers. Deer movement is mostly at dawn and dusk, so low light performance is important, and I am working with lower light transmission to my eyes, for the reasons above.

Looking for recommendations for low light binos with a nice long eye relief, sub $750.

I am thinking something like an 8x42 would be about right. I see there are also 7x50 binos, which would have a wider exit pupil. Is this true in practice, or more of a case of "in theory" not in practice?

Thank you,
-pg

 

[LCguy]

Here is a good resource, this guy measured the eye relief on all his binos

Usable eye relief in binoculars

I just finished measuring usable eye relief on virtually all of the binoculars in my collection. See https://binocular.ch/the-pinac-collection/#collection , then click on any binocular in the collection that you are interested in, to find the eye relief / usable eye relief data in the...

www.birdforum.net

 

[nm.otter]

Ask your optometrist about the possibility of an undercorrected set (full astigmatism, some diopters off) of contacts. If you can make that work with semi-functional near-ish vision, a pair of generic glasses and a twist of the knob on your sport optics might work.

 

[wyoguy]

I'm a glasses wearer, the zeiss conquest HD version haven't tried the HDX, Leica Trinovid and Maven B1.2 have been some of the best for eye relief and middle end glass I've found for me.

 

[JR Greenhorn]

I realize this thread is getting a bit stale; did you find a solution yet, @puddleglum?

I'm not as nearsighted as you, but astigmatism and floaters have been issues for me my whole life. My experience with binoculars has been much better when I take my glasses off to use binoculars. Then you can adjust the eye cups to where they're intended to be (avoiding eye relief issues), and adjust the diopter to compensate for your eyes. You won't be able to hand off or share your binoculars with someone else, but that's probably not a concern most of the time anyway.

One other thing, I tried a Bino Bandit, and I was surprised how much it helped. Blocking the light from the side and the distractions in my peripheral made a big difference for me. It's quite the opposite of the situation with glasses on and long eye relief.

 

[puddleglum]

I realize this thread is getting a bit stale; did you find a solution yet, @puddleglum?

I'm not as nearsighted as you, but astigmatism and floaters have been issues for me my whole life. My experience with binoculars has been much better when I take my glasses off to use binoculars. Then you can adjust the eye cups to where they're intended to be (avoiding eye relief issues), and adjust the diopter to compensate for your eyes. You won't be able to hand off or share your binoculars with someone else, but that's probably not a concern most of the time anyway.

One other thing, I tried a Bino Bandit, and I was surprised how much it helped. Blocking the light from the side and the distractions in my peripheral made a big difference for me. It's quite the opposite of the situation with glasses on and long eye relief.

I picked up a pair of Opticron Oregon 4 PC Oasis 8x42 binos. They have pretty long advertised eye relief (22mm?) and I find them to just have enough to be able to use them with my glasses on and have no blacked out edges of vision. By contrast, my laser range finder has an advertised 18mm eye relief and I lose a lot of the edges of vision.

Taking my glasses off in the field to use the binos would be very impractical and rather risky, as I am blind without my glasses for all intents and purposes, and my glasses are rather expensive. If I were to drop my glasses I would not be able to see them unless my eyes were within a few inches of them, so I would really be working off of feel alone. I would have to take off my glasses, slowly and carefully fold them and put them into a pocket (by feel since i wouldn't be able to see the pocket), then pull out the binos and glass, then put the binos away, pull the glasses back out, unfold them and put them back on. Any change in my surroundings, like the thing I was glassing moving in the middle of all that rigamarole, would be invisible to me.