Thread: Handycam as spotting scope?

Have used the camera quite a few times, even down at Alexandra for rabbit spotting.

1st problem - when you look into a spotting scope, your eye is seeing the entire field of view from the eyepiece. When you look at a viewfinder, your eye focuses only on the (small) screen/viewfinder. So you'll see a lot more detail with the spotting scope than the view finder/screen.

Zooms are a bit of advertising trick too. A digital zoom that gives you 75x zoom is simply enlarging the object. Think of it like a photocopier - if you were to print something out and hold it really close to you eye, the perception is that you've zoomed in, but the reality is all you've done is blown up the image, and you'll get loads of blocky pixels. It becomes tricky spotting small bullet holes when the image is zoomed up and really blocky.

Have a look at :



there's some serious digital zooming going on towards the end at the Sky Tower.

Overall choice, spotting scope for the range, camera for out in the field. Your mileage may vary though