I went out to a local open space/preserve area this morning to test out the binos. I brought along my Leica 10x42s to compare. Both were used off a Sirui TO24sk tripod with a VA5 head.
Caveat: I do not have time looking through a lot of glass, and the only 15x + binos I've looked through was a friend's low level vortex 15s handheld. I do have a lot of time with Meopta 10x42s and my current Leicas.
I set up the diopter for the B5s yesterday, and noticed the focus was very sensitive and it didn't seem like they had good depth of field, but this was at close range in my neighborhood.
Out in more realistic conditions this morning there were no issues with depth of field. They weren't as forgiving as my Leicas under 1000yds, but I do not know if this is a higher mag bino trait or unique to the B5.
I appreciated being able to have the 18s on a tripod and use my 10s to look at things closer. When viewing at distance there simply is not a contest, the 18s are awesome! I found a herd of cow elk with the 18s, switched to the 10s on the tripod, and simply could not make them out. This was about 5 minutes before the sun actually broke the horizon. When I came home I used OnX to measure the distance: 2.8 miles.
I mostly like the reticle design. It's a floating center dot with hash marks at .2mil. There is a larger hash mark at every 1mil interval, and from 4 to 5 mil they have .1mil hash marks. The scale extends to 20mil left, right, and down. Where I think there might be an issue from a shooting perspective is there is nothing above the center point. I could see this being a problem for a spotter who has these locked in on a target and the shooter misses high. You don't have an easy, exact reference unless you move the center point or infer the distance they were off using the lower portion of the reticle. I think this is a small price to pay for how unobtrusive the reticle appears while glassing.
The plan was to get out to a range that has targets to 600yds this weekend. It would've been a great test of using these binos to aid in truing velocity, zeroing, and as a shooter spotter system where everyone is using mils and FFP scopes with mil reticles, but rain looks like it may interfere.
