Thread: 12power binos

I was wondering if 12x power binos are good for south island alpine hunting or will it be too close focused and wear the user out? How many people use 12x power as your go to binos?

Gidday - unless they are absolutely top quality, I think you will be very disappointed - 12x generally have a small field of view, will be difficult to hold steady and will need to be physically large to give the light gathering ability that is so important to locating game in mountain country (even during the day you need to be able to see into the shady gullies etc)

I hunted for years with good quality 7x and spotted as much game (mainly Tahr) as anybody. When I had the opportunity to go "top shelf" I looked through a lot of pairs of bino's, and for my eye, 8x was best, the 10's tended to restrict my ability to "scan". Everyone's eyes have different scan habits and its critical that your bino's suit you habit . . . .

Cheers

I have 10x ELs and just got some really good 11's and I like them, have tried to use 8s and just found I was straining all the time trying to pull the landscape that little bit closer to my eye, the argument for 8s having a wider field of view is void when you're in big country, if you're scanning faces at 1000yds or further away you're still going to be looking at a good few hundred feet of area in your field of view at anyone time, that's plenty of area to look at at any one moment and for an animal to be holed up in and you're still going to cover a lot of ground with a field of view like that. To tell the truth I spot a heap of animals very far off just with my naked eye then use binos to confirm age/sex/size etc and a slightly higher magnification helps greatly with this

10x min for me.

High quality 12x binos may be okay for daytime use on a tripod (i.e Swarovski EL 12x50's), but I wouldn't buy them as general purpose binos.

+1 on what Tentman said.

Frodo, thats a good explanation. I agree 100% with the basics of finding movement in the field of view. I'm trying see if I will gain by going 12power and losing like 20m in the view and be able to keep it still enough on the go. It's hard enough keeping it calm on a climb and glassing on the way with 10power.

May be worth trying out a pair.

Here's a review which may be of some interest: Swarovski 12x50 EL Review