No cure for sore feet
--By Jim Matthews
Optics Quest, Day Two: Innovation.
With my feet already getting sore, I spent the first 15 minutes of the day reading SHOTDaily in the press room. It’s not as good as the show daily we did, way back when, but that’s another story (that frankly, no one will publish). I was immediately drawn to the Leupold advertisement in the centerspread and walked back down to the Leupold www.leupold.com booth. I’d missed this yesterday. Switch power binoculars offer something that normal zoom binoculars can’t: quality. Most zoom binoculars are inexpensive and (can I say this?) pretty horrid optically. You know this; we’ve all used them. They don’t look too bad at seven power, but when you crank them up to 10 or 12 or 20 power, your eyes are looking at two different spots on the globe, everything is blurry, and a headache immediately sets in. Quality zoom binoculars jump out of most people’s price range. Or did.
There are two products that buck this trend with optical innovation. The first is the Leupold Gold Rings with the switch power technology that caught my eye in the ad. Try them and you will be impressed. There are two models, a 7/12x32 and a 10/17x42, and both offer optical quality at both powers. At 17-power, you need to have your arms resting to hold them steady, but they offer glassing and spotting scope ability in a single product. Waaaaay cool.
Later the same day, there was a Bushnell www.bushnell.com press conference and they were touting their new Infinity 8-16x42 zoom. So I went back to their booth and played with those for a long time. I tried to give myself a headache, as if I were glassing pronghorn. While I’m not sure there’s an advantage to having a zoom over the switch power (you end up using zooms at the two ends of their range most of the time), these Bushnell zooms offer amazing optical performance. I know I’ll be using one or both of these new products at least some of the time this fall. You need to look at them if you haven’t already.
Something you shouldn’t miss, is the new Burris www.burrisoptics.com very cool holographic red dot shotgun sight introduced called the Speed Bead. The sight mounts between the receiver and rear stock of a shotgun, sitting close to the line of the bore, and allowing for quick, accurate shotgun shooting even if the stock is not shouldered correctly or even when the head is not in contact with the stock. When Bushnell first came out with its Holosight, I put one on a shotgun and used it a lot. It is the fastest and most intuitive shotgun sight I’ve ever seen. You can put a shotgun in a rank amateur’s hands and have them hitting clay targets with consistency in two minutes. If you can convince shotgunners to try the Speed Bead, they will love it.
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