9 Things To Consider Before Buying A Spotting Scope

powerful little bugger hey i can see grass look at that i wasn't even trying and i found it just like that well anyone who's spent much time in the field with me knows that i am no superman the last time i tried to leap over a building in a single bound i stubbed my toe and the last time i tried to stop a speeding locomotive i chickened out and ran off the tracks but when i'm hunting i use my superman vision a spotting scope hi i'm ron spomer and welcome to another episode of everything outdoors on ronspomeroutdoors.com hey while i'm thinking of it please subscribe to our youtube channel right here and check us out on ronspomeroutdoors.com our website you can also find us on facebook and instagram by searching for ron spomer outdoors now today i want to talk about spotting scopes and these are spotting scopes most hunters and birders eventually want a spotting scope because it gives them superman vision you can get spotty scopes with magnifications up to 60 70 perhaps even 80 power that's massive most of them now come with zoom lenses but to understand spotting scopes we should probably go through the whole unit and explain what is inside of those that makes them work and how do you avoid buying one that's dark soft focus and a piece of junk well let's just look and consider a spotting scope as one half of a binocular because that's essentially what it is it's one barrel and one eyepiece instead of two buy for two by ocular monocular spotting scope so start from the front end the objective lens and this is critical because the bigger that lens the more light that it lets into the instrument brighter image right good so look for a big objective but don't get too big or you're going to have to carry a lot of bulk and weight around there's always a trade-off in this business so the objective lens can be and should be ed glass hd glass essentially those terms mean a fluoride glass and that means it has a high refractive index it well it essentially eliminates color fringing and this happens at high magnifications because when the light goes through glass in a prism it bends and comes out at a different angle and then it shifts into all the colors of the rainbow and you've probably seen that light going through a prism glass and you see the rainbow well that rainbow is not going to make for a very sharp image in the eyepiece you're going to have a deer or an elk that looks like a red edge and a purple edge and a blue edge and a yellow edge and it just don't it's not sharp that's called color fringing so to get rid of it you've got to reduce the shifting of the wavelengths of that white light into all that color spectrum and that is what edd or hd glass does it's got this refractive index that minimizes that bend of a light and the rainbow effect really important after about 20 power because the higher the magnification the more that light is bent and the more the wavelengths get separated into those color bands that fluorite glass helps bring all that back to a sharp crisp focus so everything looks normal i highly recommend that on any high magnification instrument especially a spotting scope okay so we've got our ed hd fluorite lens that's great pass the light through the binocular and it goes into a prism just like with a binocular oh i said binocular earlier i meant spotting scope same as with a binocular goes into a prism now the weird thing about spotting scopes is the manufacturers never tell you what's in it for a prism it could be a roof prism and that could be a schmidt peckin or an abbey konig it could have a mirror on it it needs a mirror if it's one and what kind of a mirror is it silver or dielectric you know those are all contributors to brightness but for some reason i cannot find anything in the literature so you might want to do a little more searching maybe call the company and see if they'll spill the beans otherwise you just have to look through it and see the image and determine whether or not it's bright and if you can get several spotting scopes to compare that would help a lot but just be sure you know that there is a prism in here and that's important because it bends the light and that extends the length of the light travels which increases magnification so you don't have to have a huge long spawning scope because the light rays are being bent through the prism but the more important thing the prism does is it turns things right side up and flipped around so it's not upside down and backwards if you've ever looked through an astronomical telescope you might not even realize it but they project images that are upside down and backwards because they don't have a prism inside well who cares if you're looking at the moon upside down and backwards unless you're mapping it but an elk upside down and backwards that's a little confusing that's why we want one of these field spotting scopes okay so the light bounces through and if it's got good sharp prism glass in it and it's phase coated and has a good mirror surface on it a silver mirror or a dielectric you're getting maximum brightness through that instrument to the eyepiece and now is where it gets really critical because the eyepiece is what really gives you your magnification yeah the barrel length has a lot to do with magnification but man if you can go from 20 power to 60 power just by turning this little dial on the eyepiece what does that tell you the magnification is happening right in here it's just like a magnifying glass and you're getting in closer and closer to that subject so you can buy eyepieces that interchange if you get a good one like this that's a 20 to 60 you really don't need to buy anymore in the old days i used to buy spotting scopes and i would get a 20x and a 45x and a 60x individual eyepieces don't have those problems anymore with these beautiful zoom eyepieces so i recommend you get one of those now here is some essential stuff you need to realize exit pupil that is that little circle of light you see right there in the eyepiece and that has it has to match up with your pupil or be larger than your pupil because that diameter of light is like you looking through a keyhole and if it is smaller than your pupil is dilated you're not getting all the light in that you could use now it's tough to get a spawning scope that is going to give you an exit pupil matching yours the human pupil will dilate down or shrink down to about two and a half millimeters in bright sunlight and then as it starts to get dim at dusk your pupil enlarges dilates to let more light in but this doesn't unless you turn the power down so watch this we're at 25 power 30 power 40 power 50. you see how it gets a little bit smaller as i go up but there's not a lot of variation why is that mathematically you can determine the diameter of the exit pupil by dividing the objective lens diameter in millimeters by the power so if this is a 60 millimeter and this is a 20 power 20 goes into 60 three times you would have a three millimeter exit pupil yeah that's great for for bright daylight but once dusk hits you can't get any lower than 20 power on an eyepiece what are you going to do you could buy one with 15 power and you'd pick up a little bit but really even if you went to a really big 85 millimeter even 90 95 millimeter objective lens still you crank that power up to 60 and you divide that into 90 you're looking at about a 1.3 to 1.5 diameter in your exit pupil that is not a lot folks so get ready to look at some fairly dim images but you might be surprised even though they're fairly dim because of that tiny exit pupil they really are sharp enough to detect a lot of detail even at dusk and that is because a good spawning scope will have anti-reflection coatings on all the air-to-glass lens surfaces and that is critically important because what that does is it increases all the light that gets through rather than bouncing off you know when you walk past the window on a store or something you look and you can see your reflection that is light that's bouncing off the glass doesn't get into the room this is the room you want the light to get into it all the way out through the eyepiece so you can put on the surface of each one of those glasses you can put anti-reflection coatings at a microscopic level and they do some voodoo magic with phase shift and what it amounts to is instead of reflecting light they let it pass through one coating of this anti-reflection material can reduce by about half the amount of light that's being lost normally glass will lose about four percent of the light you put a coating on and then knocks it in half you put another coating on knocks it in half again and different types of coatings address different light waves like blues and reds and such so that's the magic that goes into these that makes them so expensive these optical engineers understand all that stuff and they apply just the right coatings to these lenses to maximize light transfer so that's what you want to look for fully multi-coated optics that's what you want your spawning scope fluorite lens to get rid of the color fringing fully multi-colored optics ask them what kind of a prism is in there see if it's got a top quality mirror and after that you probably have all the optical quality you could use and i don't know what else a guy could look for it's all pretty hard to see inside there anyway so study the literature look for those features and then compare if you can get a bunch of different spotting scopes and when the light goes down in the evening or early in the morning before it really gets bright that's when you want to check things out to see which one looks the sharpest to you now other features are for convenience essentially and that is where your focus ring is some rings are on the barrel some spotting scopes will have their focus on a little extra barrel sticking out on top the eyepiece usually has the zoom feature that's pretty easy to use you just look down at it and turn now talk about sizes look at this little guy that is a 50 millimeter objective and it's always brighter when i take the lens cap off this thing is surprisingly good just because this is tiny doesn't mean that you have to have a small power ring on it now it makes sense to have a fairly small one because of that exit pupil relationship but this one goes from 7 power up to 22 power if it's a 50 millimeter out in the front and i thought when i first saw this what a gimmick what a toy but by golly when i looked through it i was amazed at how bright crisp and sharp this thing is it really is a viable option now why would you stop at 27 power or 25 power when you can go up to 60 well it's that exit pupil problem and it's also a weight issue if you're out backpack hunting you don't want to have a big monster scope like this with you this is my compromise kind of an all-around 65 millimeter but if i'm gonna go backpacking up really high i might want to consider something tiny and lightweight like this some of these big guys will weigh four almost six pounds and this little thing probably not even hitting a pound pretty close to a pound the way it feels so it's something worth considering and the other thing to consider about that power at 27 or 25 power you get much higher than about 35 to 40 and you start to magnify all the problems that are in the atmosphere heat shimmer dust smoke there's not a lot of days that are crisp and clear enough that you can use a 60 magnification so keep that in mind when you're considering a tiny little spawning scope like this ah i was mistaken on this little hummingbird hummingbird 56 ed i hadn't even seen that i just got this and i was really surprised but i didn't understand that this was a 56 millimeter not a 50. but that's why we've got two different numbers on here this goes from 9x to 27x if it's a 56 millimeter objective if you put this eyepiece onto the 50 millimeter smaller version that's when it becomes a 7x to 22 power wow that's good to know so this is really a good option right here i would be tempted to take this little guy sheep hunting my next time up in the mountains it is so light compact and ridiculously sharp for its size powerful little bugger hey i can see grass look at that i wasn't even trying and i found it just like that boy beyond that there are things like oh eye cups turning up that's a convenience feature so when i'm using my uh my glasses i have to turn that cup down so that i can get close enough to get a full field of view right but if i take my glasses off for extended viewing i turn the eye cup up it's rubber coated so i can put my forehead right against it it's nice and soft and now it's dark all around because i've cut out the extraneous light and i can rest my brow in there to steady things makes it a little easier to watch the other thing you want to consider is the angle of the eyepiece this one is a 45 degree angle eyepiece which i find extremely comfortable but a lot of people like to straight angle and this is a straight right here i used to like the straight but here's the problem with it you've got to get your tripod pretty high to see through it comfortably you know it's funny thing with these spawning scopes they're always brighter when you take off the covers i still haven't figured that one out but you see how i i'm having trouble getting down in here okay obviously i got to bring this guy down a little bit all right that's better now that's not bad but look at how high i am if the wind is blowing it's going to vibrate i'm going to have some problems right here but nice and comfortable i can live with that but if there's suddenly a goat way up there i've got to go like this and i'm scorching down and i'm bending my neck uncomfortably and if i have a hunting partner who's appreciably shorter or taller than i am then we've got to move things again so they can use it comfortably and now we've lost the image and we have to relocate just not really convenient now let's just try it with an angled eyepiece and i think you'll see what i mean about a comfortable view so now not only am i able to comfortably stand and look down i can bring that baby up i still have to squat down a little bit but overall i just find it easier to look through it like this and here's a real benefit if you have a collar that releases you can spin this thing so essentially the axis is still on the target so i say ralph you need to take a look at this elk ralph comes over from this side and says get out of your way or pick the tripod up move it over i don't want to do either one of those i just want him to see it i turn the release on the collar spin it over and ralph can look in i gotta lean a little bit because i don't want to get kissed by ralph but he can look in and say whoa that is a big elk and then it's back to me and now john comes over and he gets a crack at it really pretty handy now another thing that we sometimes do not very often but this can work and we've done it crawling through the rocks on a sheep hunt and we didn't want to expose ourselves so we eased that spawning scope up on the tripod we rotated it completely down like this and we lay underneath the rocks looking at it like that you can lie there and study them for hours without exposing yourself so you know there's a lot of little features you want to watch for in this body scope the other thing is the actual mount most of them will come or all of them i've seen will come with a quarter by 20 that's your standard screw thread for cameras and tripod mounting and then there's a little plug inside you can take it out and it's a larger thread some of them have a 3 8 inch i think but you can put plates on there that are quick release a lot of cameras have those and i got a bunch of those and they will fit on certain quick release bases like this one so if i turn this instead of screwing it off i just slide it now i can put my camera on there and use it so a different plate mount now some companies have custom built right in and this is one of them swarovski has this plate that fits on their tripod i have not seen an other tripod that would fit it but if i pop this one off i can fit this one on without having to have an extra piece so that's kind of convenient if you have that bigger brand but now my camera is not going to fit on there because that foot is not the foot that's on my camera so all the little things that you can consider [Applause] mostly though what's important about your spotting scope are those ingredients we discussed for sharpness and brightness the ed glass fully multi-coated try to figure out if they got a face coated prism inside there and if it has a silver or dielectric coating on it um and then just select your power don't worry too much about going too high in magnification if you're hunting out of a boat or a truck something where you're just glassing from close to that truck where you carry a large unit around you can get an 80 millimeter 85 even a 95 millimeter big heavy things four to six pounds but if you're not having to carry them up and over the mountains why not because you get a little more brightness something else you should consider is how you protect your spotting scope these things don't don't come at a dollar a piece you know they're pretty pricey so you want to protect them they do generally have the armor coating on them and that helps a lot with dings and scratches but still a lot of hunters like to put a neoprene cover on it and those work pretty well and what i really like about them is the front cover on the objective just that easily pops on and off and once it's there it's there you don't lose it you know with a with a typical spawning scope cover like this you pop that off and then where do you put it next thing you know you've left it on the tundra somewhere so there's a benefit to having one of these the downside to them is sometimes it's a little more difficult to find all the controls but these seem to work pretty well through this one there's your focus and you can't miss this it's on the eyepiece there's your power and the eyepiece cover really simple so you can pop this together keeps the rain off of it most of these are waterproof but this always helps a little bit to keep some of that mist and rain off of it so you might want to consider one generally you can get one as an aftermarket product most of the brands will offer them sig sauer includes it with this this is the oscar 8 great spotting scope now if uh in addition to these covers something i recommend looking for is an and attached sun shade why would you want a sun shade well when the sun shines directly onto the lens you get flare most of these high-end pieces with fully multi-coated optics clear up the flare pretty nicely but still even if you don't have a flare issue with the sun shining on there you're going to have a rain issue if it starts to drip and this little hood sticking out really helps keep the rain off that objective so you don't lose it because it's permanently attached nice little feature you know that's something else to look at when you're testing a binoculars how smoothly the controls run not only does that tell you something about the quality but if they're fairly tight when it's brand new that's good because over time things wear out you know it's going to get looser so start out fairly tight and then as you use it it'll get smoother and looser especially looser but you want smooth right from the get-go i see on this one swarovski has put hd for high definition that's what tells me they've got that fluorite lens element in there to fix all the uh color fringing and it works darn well these are great spotting scopes all of them uh different brands out there meopta nikon's got some really good ones i've tried over the years zeiss has some excellent product uh celestron this little guy right here they're just a whole slew of them out there don't be afraid to check out some of them that are marketed at birders there are some companies that don't want to get involved with hunting because of all the nonsense about anti-hunting stuff but they make some good products anyway so you might want to want to consider a brooding spotting scope same thing as a hunting spotting scope just different marketing techniques you know it's it's possible to use a spotting scope without a tripod you just need something solid to set it on like this i mean look what i'm doing i have it resting here on the table and then to elevate it to look at that hillside i just put its cover underneath press down on it and it's remarkably steady a bean bag works really well too if you just have a small bag full of beans rice or corn or something you can lay that on a surface and set that spotting scope on it put it over the window of a car works really well you just slide it around it's actually easier and quicker to work with than a tripod what else can we tell you that's about it really some of the new ones are coming up with crazy features like removable eyepieces so you can put a 65 millimeter front end on it or an 80 85 95 whatever they offer you can go with a straight eyepiece or switch to an angle it's a little more versatile a lot of stuff to buy though and that's about all you need to know for a good spotting scope i would urge you to spend as much as you can afford on a high quality one i mean there are some lower priced ones that work out pretty darn well but you'd better investigate before you drop your coins on it when magnification goes up so do all the aberrations in an instrument and that's why you want to spend more money on it because getting up there to 40 60 power you're going to notice any little issues with the optical quality of that instrument and that's the good news and the bad news on spotting scopes i would urge you to try to get yourself some superman vision if you're an outdoor lover and you like to see a whole new world this will enable you to do it you can look sometimes four and five miles and not only find game but you can even see if it's a buck or a bull and sometimes you can even say it's a six point versus the four point good optics are superman eyeballs out in the field i'm ron spomer thanks for watching don't forget hunt honest shoot straight [Music] you

Channel: Ron Spomer Outdoors

Views: 23,824

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Keywords: outdoors, ron spomer outdoors, ron spomer, hunting, firearms, guns, shooting sports, rifles, big game hunting, hunting gear, hunting gear review, rifle review, gun review, spotting scopes for long range shooting, spotting scopes for hunting, spotting scopes for target shooting, hunting scopes reviews, hunting scopes 2020, hunting scopes best, spotting scope for bird watching, best spotting scope, spotting scope

Id: W0zOVHEfG78

Length: 23min 35sec (1415 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 10 2020