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Old 18-01-2016, 09:55 AM
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Satchmo
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Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: Sydney
Posts: 1,883
I spent a night using these Fork mount binos at SPSP one year . I think they are made by Kunming United Optical.

These binoculars are in a completely different league of optical and mechanical quality to the 25 X 100 's you see around for $400. They use triplet semi-apo objectives and I would describe them as two apo telescopes locked together . Sure there is a touch of false colour , but these optical trains are telescope grade.

I used 24 Panoptics , 17mm Hyperion , 13mm Nagler and 7mm Nagler eyepieces ( no vignetting visible ) . The eyepiece barrels are chromed and a fairly snug twist fit , so you would want to try an eypiece first before you bought a pair. The 7mm ( 95X ) showed a slight mis collimation when we looked at Saturn . We took the plate off the porro housing on that side to find the porro prisms mounted on very sturdy mounts with ...wait for it...large brass worm and wheel assemblies with screw adjusters . These will not routinely lose collimation . A tiny tweak and we had images merged. The view of Saturn featured the Cassini Division easily and shadow of globe on rings .

The contrast was very good and the field very flat and sharp with all eyepieces . The objectives are F6.

The binoculars are very heavy for one person to fit onto the fork. These binoculars really need a large sturdy parallelogram mount such as sold at Big Binoculars and they would really shine as the fork mount is hard to use in that jacking the head up to get the eyepieces at a convenient height is not so easy .

The ones I used were from a bunch of 3 that had been brought in by an individual importer and one pair had proved to have substandard optics. This set had a nice star test , so as with everything from China if you buy a pair buyer beware and make sure the vendor is prepared to swap yours out or give you a refund in an agreed period if you find the optics to be poor. Tricky when you have a reasonable expectation of looking at stars .

Hope this helps.
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