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Hi
I thought I'll share my experience so far with Binoviewer - I have a Denk Big Easy.
Initially I purchased two sets of eyepieces for it - a pair of 20mm GSO Superviews and a pair of KK Erfle 20mm. I found the GSO's not meeting my expectations by a large margin.
The binoviewer does look and perform very well indeed but then again I did not have opportunity to compare it to other units.
I do have a complain or two about the Denk - in its OCS it uses BRIGHT lens retaining rings that are sure to reflect light and cause loss of contrast or worse. The bright retaining rings are used both in the barlow element as well as focal reducer. I have raised this with Denk - Denkmeier thinks that this is not a problem.
Nowhere on the web will you also see a mention that the Panoptic 24mm will vignette in this Binoviewer as it does - it is right on the margin but prevents you from seeing the field stop as a sharp ring.
I found the focal reducer element useless in planetary or Moon viewing - the rings cause so much reflections near the edge it is not even funny.
As for the Eyepieces both the Pan and KK produce spectacular viewing with the Pan clearly best eyepiece in the Bino.
I think the greatest untold story is the eventual cost of a binoviewer once you discover that you will need decent eyepieces all costing you double as you need pairs of them.
I use the Denk for viewing all objects and they do excel in Moon and planetary obsessing. I found them loosing a bit in sharpness and some loss of light on other objects but the ease of viewing and 3D effect more than compensates for it. Many people I am told do not look back and observe with a binoviewer only... I use the binos in a 10" SCT.
The bino weights about 1.5 KG with a pair of 24 Pans so make sure you can deal with that.
Overall I am very pleased with the solution but wonder if perhaps a lower cost Bino would work as good.
Joe
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