I have been attending the British BirdFair for many years now but I have never experienced such a strong competition in the optics market like this year. Today I spent the whole morning in the optics marquee to explore great quality binoculars and the surprise wasn’t all about the big brands like Zeiss, Swarovski or Leica but other ones like Vortex, Celestron, KOWA, Hawke, Viking, Nikon, GPO and Opticron and also non-flagship binoculars of the big ones.
While the price of the binoculars I tried (and liked) vary greatly, there wasn’t a clear correlation between the price and quality (meaning the more expensive are always the best) and this is actually very good news for budget binoculars seekers. The low price no longer means poor quality and several brands have proven it to me today.
More detailed findings will come about these binoculars in the next few months but I wanted to give a bit of an impression about the power of BirdFair.
Bellow some of the binoculars I have been very impressed of.
- The brand new Vortex Razor 10×42 UHD binoculars
- The brand new KOWA BD II XD 10×42 binoculars
- The brand new Celestron Trailseeker ED 10×42 binoculars
- Hawke Frontier HD X 10×42
The list is far not complete so stay tuned for more details… In the meantime tell us what brand of binoculars have you been using.
