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12
Jul 10

Decision made: Photo Mechanic instead of Lightroom!

“Where have you been all along”?

Oh, I had feared you would ask – sorry for that extended break again. Now that the football world cup is over, more time for the important things in life remains, like updating my blog ;-) Promise!

A lot actually has happened since my last post, and I will need some time (yes, I know, if I am ever able to…)  to catch up, with my existing posting ideas turning into articles.

One of the major decisions I have made some weeks ago is to actually abandon Photoshop Elements for most purposes – a software I have used since version 2.0 when it was still called Photoshop Album – for something better. And of course, like everybody else not using a Mac (those also have the choice of Apple’s Aperture) I had considered Adobe Lightroom as the natural next thing to turn to. So when Adobe released the Lightroom 3.0 beta version, I gave it yet another try and installed it on my machine, to find out if I would like it this time. My first experiments two years ago ended with me not purchasing it, because Lightroom actually lacked many of the features I had come to like in Photoshop Elements back then.

Concurrently, I thought why not follow a tip I got on a workshop last fall by some fellow photographer who is actually a Lufthansa airline pilot and who recommended Photo Mechanic from Camera Bits, a tool seemingly known and used mostly by pro-photographers. Thinking, “Hey, this guy is a pilot, so he sure must like stuff that works and gets a job done!”, I downloaded and installed Photo Mechanic, and tried it concurrently with Lightroom for the image downloading and selection of a few photo shoots back in May.

To put it into perspective: Photo Mechanic is a pure photo downloading, browsing, and tagging/keywording application. That’s where the functionality stops. It is not a RAW converter, and has no image editing capabilities. In that, it is much more like the tandem of Nikon ViewNX and Nikon TransferNX you get for free when you buy a Nikon DSLR. The troubles I had with Nikon ViewNX I had blogged about earlier, and was starting to turn away from this combination as well.

“So what happened?”

From day one, I started using Photoshop Mechanic for my real “work”, instead of Nikon ViewNX. I had had the intention to merely test it, but I just never went back to my old tools. Hmmm. Does tell something, doesn’t it?

“And Lightroom?”

Yes, I forced myself to test it as well. I did, and though I had taken some classes on Lightroom previously on various occasions, and had a good grip on the software and its capabilities, it didn’t do the job for me as effortlessly and unobtrusively as Photo Mechanic. Instead of going into detail why, I for my part don’t think the selection of a software is a rational decision only – just like the selection of a camera body or a lens requires the real tactile feedback, the software has to feel like the right tool for the job at hand.

One point that certainly made a strong point for Photo Mechanic is the ridiculously low computing power requirement of the software. Mostly probably because it is exactly not a RAW converter, and since my lesson learned I always shoot JPG+RAW together, so I rely on Photoshop CS3 for the RAW conversion should I start image editing.

“Why is this important? Just get a faster machine!”

Well, for one, I did make a decision to spend money to buy stuff that makes me produce better photos, and just a new computer with more GHz and GByte will not do this for me. And secondly, looking forward I know I will need to get a Netbook for traveling soon, and as these are pleasantly cheap and pleasantly light by now, I have no intention to revert to a heavy and costly laptop for during-the-trip image downloading, selection and tagging (oh – you see my case now?).  Photo Mechanic actually made me feel I just got a new PC, it is so much faster than Nikon ViewNX. And I am running this on a 2003 Dell. If it runs on that, it will run on the Netbook as well.

“Well, that’s not a fair comparison – Lightroom is meant to run on modern PCs!”

Never said this was a fair comparison – I am just reporting what works for me at this time, and maybe to encourage you – if you are facing the same decision I did – to consider also non-mainstream solutions for yourself, maybe they fit you better, as they did fit me!

“Can you show me this ‘wonderful’ software?”

Sure I can! Here are some screenshots of the software in production at my place, but I want to encourage you to go to Camera Bits website – they of course have a fully functional trial version as well!

Here is a look at the thumbnail contact sheet view:

There is of course a larger single view as well:

This can do comparison views, in horizontal and vertical, locked and unlocked (surpassing ViewNX in this):

And the IPTC dialog looks very raw, but has many useful features:

It does support GPS as well, though I won’t change my GPS workflow using Geosetter for this, it is useful to be able to pop up the window with the Google Maps embedded:

“Hey, you must be kidding! This ain’t pretty!”

As said before, it works for me. Your mileage may vary ;-)

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10
Apr 10

Delete that image!

After having refreshed the image archive, there was just one more thing left: Revisit Texas. Long time readers might remember my disk space investigation one year ago, which led eventually to me buying my beloved little Synology DS 207+ NAS with 2 TB of disk space. Now, after having added those 5000 JPEGs to the disk, I was wondering how the disk space utilization came along, and whether I was threatened with another disk upgrade soon…

In case you are having the same thoughts, I have made the script I used to calculate that statistic available on the newly created download page at Alpenglow.info as freeware. I’m interested in feedback, so please give it a try and let me know if it works for you!

So here is the result of running the statistics script on my NAS:

disk_space_usage_2010Oh – positive suprise! The aggregated disk space curve actually flattens roughly mid-2009, despite my fears of faster image data growth after I had upgraded the camera to more Megapixels and Megabyte per image. What is the explanation? Well, it’s actually two:

  1. I did not have as much time for my hobby as I did before, and definitely did less photo shoots and excursions since then. I am inclined to change that again, and the next workshops are already booked :-)
  2. I definitely improved my workflow: Instead of importing the JPEGs into Photoshop Album, keywording and assigning the 1-5 star rating in there (usually keeping even the 1 star images), I rather go through the images using the RAW viewer Nikon ViewNX first, and use the “1″ key (which assigns a red category marker) for those images that are definitely not worth keeping. After I have made one pass through the images, I immediately use the filter selector to select all red category images, and delete them from the disk. Phew!

Now the one real challenge is to flag as many images for deletion as possible. And I definitely got better at this, being more critical towards my own images and recognizing when images will not be suitable for presentation and thus don’t satisfy my own quality criteria (and have no nostalgical value yet )  – to say it with the words of Florian Möllers, a workshop leader I once had the pleasure to experience on a nature photography course in the Bavarian Forest national park (I think to remember that Florian himself was quoting the late Fritz Pölking – please make sure to pay Fritz’ website a visit, there is definitely a wealth of information about nature photography there):

Tapfer sein! (Be courageous!)

Which translates to: Delete those images! Get rid of them immediately! There will be better days, and better photos!

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13
Mar 10

Remember the milk… and the compact

Last weekend we finally went skiing again – cross country, of course. Being inspired by so many hours of wonderful HD Vancouver coverage, and the awesome winter weather out there, we booked a room in a little hotel in the Tannheim valley in Austria, less than 2 hours drive from Munich.

Guess what happened? Arriving on Sunday afternoon in the best of all possible sun flooded winter snows, we hit the track and had a great time. Next morning, things were even getting better – after one of the coldest nights of the year with temperatures way below -20° C (that’s -5° F), the sun came out and everything – and I mean really everything – was covered by the thickest hoar frost I have ever seen. And since last year I’m in love with hoar frost, remember?

We did a great tour of about 18 km through this wonderful landscape, and I’d love to show you photos – but I can’t, because while I had packed the huge Lowepro backpack with D300 and everything, I just forgot the tiny little Canon ixus 40 on my desk. Was too small. Just overlooked it in the huge pile of equipment I packed. I briefly considered taking the D300, but the >1 kg monster including lens was not suited for cross-contry, neither was the Computrekker Plus backpack. That is certainly not suited for any kind of sports, as it’s just barely ok for airplane travel.

Quickly decided to rathermore enjoy the scenery without taking pictures – only thing I can share of this perfect afternoon is our track. For more interest on geo-tagging and GPS data workflows, you’re invited to revisit my previous posts on this topic.

Wow, I just found a new feature in Google Earth 5.1 I had not noticed in it’s significance: It has a button for “Show sunlight across the landscape”. You can select date and time of day, and it will render the light. This could come in handy to predict cool photo spots in a mountainous landscape. Below the simulated phase of the Haldensee lake we touched on our ski tour at the time of day the sun dips below the first mountain range. This is certainly something I have to try in the future.

haldensee-simulation

Next day, of course, no hoar frost anymore and the sun showed itself a little less generous. Did ski, but the photos we took later that afternoon are really everything but impressive in terms of light. Look how flat the light is with snow and high fog… This is the (frozen) Haldensee lake, looking back from the position indicated on the track map towards the “camera” of the Google Earth picture shown above. The track across the lake was closed, for the ice obviously not being trusted after the prior weekend’s foehn.

haldensee

Lesson learned: Sometimes, less is more. And don’t be so stupid to leave the small camera at home.

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12
Mar 10

Body and lens selection for bird photography

Now, this is a peculiar coincidence which must not go by untapped: Scanning my backlog of link tips, I stopped at the pages Markus Jais has made detailing the options of camera bodies and lenses out there suited for bird photography. Admittedly, I had bookmarked his page over a year ago, and came back to it only today – just to find that he has updated the page to include all new Canon and Nikon camera bodies just yesterday! Same thought, different mind.

As I remember my months-long investigations and head scratching before deciding for the Sigma 100-300 f/4, I can only recommend to surf over to his page and have a look at his article on body selection, and the one on lens selection. I can agree with most of his conclusions, except maybe that you should also consider a Sony Alpha 700, which has the image stabilizer in the body stabilizing any of the long lenses.

Markus is an active member over at the Bird Photographers Net forums, which is certainly where I met him. Oh, and I just see he is living close to Munich as well!

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18
Jul 09

New gear message: Sigma 2x EX DG teleconverter

I know, I know. I shouldn’t be buying more gear but rather taking more photos with the existing equipment.

Get out there.

But I think I got a good excuse – for the second time, I will be going next week to a nature photography workshop in the German national park Bavarian Forest. The first workshop I attended in winter 2008 when I was still using my Tokina 300 mm f/4 lens, and the experience from using the fixed focal length made me change soon after to the wonderful Sigma 100-300 mm f/4 zoom for more flexibility.

Now, a second experience I had made back then was that even with the 1.5x crop factor of the D70 (and the D300 has the same), the resulting 450 mm are not enough in many situations. I did have the Kenko 1.4x tele converter allowing me to get to real 420 mm (so 630 mm full-frame equivalent). I used this extension a lot, not to say on some days all the time! But the pictures taken by those participants who hauled 300 mm f/2.8 with 2x tele converters proved to me that the difference between my 630 mm and their Canon-powered (1.6x crop) 960 mm was absolutely surprising.

So I thought I could enter the game with buying the Sigma 2.0x EX DG converter. Theoretically, this gives me the chance to do either a 200-600 mm f/8 for a full frame max length of 900 mm, or even stack the teleconverters for a 280-840 mm f/11 monster with a 1260 mm equivalent length. Question was of course, does this work, and how much image quality (if any) remains? The question e.g. is discussed (sorry, German only) at the blog of nature photography school Foto Campus, and their verdict is: Forget tele-converters.

Having read and investigated other opinions out in the net over the use and quality of 2x tele converters, I had decided to give it a try anyway – despite the warnings about the images being degraded in quality to uselessness, I saw and still see no real alternative that doesn’t blow the budget completely. So I did the purchase, and tested it last Wednesday – from the balcony of my appartment.

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The four images show the top floors of the mildly famous Hypo-Hochhaus building in Munich. (Did you know it is the 41st highest building in Germany? Well…) :

  1. The whole frame with 600 mm – image taken wide open at f/8 effective aperture, and 1/125s exposure time at ISO 200.
  2. The corner of the same frame showing some cables and antennae. This is the part I had focused on using live view. Click on “show image in full size” to get the real 100% pixel view.
  3. The whole frame later that evening taken with stacked teleconverters, this is at 1260 mm equivalent length. Image taken not stopped down at f/11 effective with 1/1.3s exposure time at ISO 200.
  4. The corner of the second frame with the same cables and antennae.

Lessons learned:

  • Ups, no autofocus at f/8? From my research I had thought only the Canons to turn off the AF, but the D300 did as well. There are tricks on how to use taping pins to get AF back, but I stuck with MF for these tests. And I can remember from my last visit in the Bavarian Forest even non-moving animals, with Lynx being cat after all… So this might not be such a big problem.
  • Live View in tripod mode allows you to zoom in to 100%, and allows for really nice manual focus.
  • Mirror lock-up is suddenly absolutely required. The images without mirror lock-up were unusable.
  • At these focal lengths, the atmospheric disturbance by the air becomes visible (comparing two images of the building with it’s regular grid of windows made this very obvious).
  • My tries to stop down to get sharper pictures failed – mostly I guess because of the low light situation and the fact that the exposure times were already reaching 1 second. All images with even longer exposures could be thrown away, maybe too many vibrations on my balcony?
  • Stacking the TCs (the 1.4x must mount to the camera body, so the 2x sits between the 1.4x and the lens) reenabled the AF again (obviously the software couldn’t cope with both TCs connected, and reverted to detecting the f/4 lens only). But in the by then low light the AF was only hunting and did not acquire lock.

Resulting image quality? I am not disappointed, but there are many things that need to be done correctly. Looking forward to give it a try next week!

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6
Apr 09

New gear message: Moved to Texas!

…but only space-wise. I actually have been pretty busy the last weeks as you might have noticed seeing the low posting rate, but I am back and with some new gear in the lab as well. So I thought it a good idea to first get this off the list, as I had promised gear-buying help here as well:

But first a warning – I am a computer engineer, so you might find some of the info below to be actually more confusing than helpful. Don’t blame me ;-)

As told in Move To Texas? I had been running out of photo disk space quickly, and had also my shared music library on the same backup drive taking away my much needed backup space. So I went the full length and bought me a little home NAS – a network attached storage which effectively is a little (tiny) file server housing one or more disk drives, and having an Ethernet connection to allow for multiple computers in the home network to access it’s data.

So, let’s look at how I arrived at the buying decision: I wanted the NAS to

  1. Provide sufficient network disk space for my lab computer as well as my wife’s much loved Apple MacBook.
  2. Have enough disk space to store all my data on it for the foreseeable future, and also hold backup images of the desktop computer.
  3. House the music library of MP3 files as well, in order to provide some streaming client (at that time to still to be chosen) access to the music without the desktop computer being powered up.
  4. Host the private photo albums easily accessible from the Web or the Home, ideally with a simple photo hosting application that can serve full HD images to my plasma TV via the MacBook.

I was aware that the NAS would not

  • Be a backup storage itself – data needs to be stored at two places at all times!
  • Provide fast enough storage space to allow for fast browsing or even direct storage of RAW files and working files – these would need to stay on the desktop’s drive, and only a shadow copy as a backup would be stored on the NAS.

So I came up with a list of technical requirements for the NAS:

  • Be a model with BYOD (bring your own disks), as I wanted to choose the disk drives myself (and thought it would be actually cheaper to get them by myself)
  • Allow for at least one Terabyte of disk space, better two.
  • Allow for mirroring drives with RAID 1 – this requires the device to have at least two disk bays, and all single drive units were out of the game.
  • Allow for RAID 0 (striping) as well instead, as I can see myself running out of the space on the mirrored drives eventually…
  • Have some sort of media server for the music to be bought music streaming client.
  • A plus would be an external SATA port, because you need to backup the NAS as well and in that case you can attach a fast external hard drive, and not just a normal slower USB drive for this.

Additional non-functional requirements:

  • Be rather quiet and power saving…
  • Be FAST! A Gigabit Ethernet port was non problem, as all units seemed to have it, but reading the benchmarks at benchmarkreviews.com and smallnetbuilder.com made it quickly clear that there are very large speed differences. And you have to pay for performance, every additional 100€ increases the performance level substantially.
  • Be no more expensive than 400€ including 2 TB disk space!

So let’s have a look at the candidates!

QNAP Turbostation TS-209Pro II

The Qnap TS-209 Pro was a bit over budget at about 460€ including two 1 TB drives, but looked actually very promising. It does have the required two drive bays, does offer media streaming via UPNP and DLNA, and got great 5 star reviews at Amazon. Complaints seem to be mostly about the device being “not silent”. It does not sport an external SATA connection, though, so additional backup drives would need to be connected to it using the slower USB ports.

Buffalo LinkStation Pro Duo

The Buffalo LinkStation Pro in it’s two drive variant is one of the cheaper devices, being at about 235€ with two 500 GByte drives. It does offer RAID 0, but is criticized as being outright loud, and its write performance is not really gold standard with less than 10 MByte/s according to the data at smallnetbuilder.com. As I did not find a version for BYOD, I did not consider the Buffalo device further despite it’s interesting price, and the slow speed also made me look for other alternatives.

Thecus N3200 Pro

The Thecus system is the only system I looked at that supports even 3 drives instead of only two, and with that also allows for RAID 5 striping accross all three drives. As the performance seems to be bad with RAID 5 due to the high CPU power required, I didn’t see this as a real advantage, though. And it certainly failed my budget check at 555€ including the two 1 TB drives. So I continued my search…

D-Link DNS-323

Even cheaper than the Buffalo at only 310€ including two 1 TB drives, the DNS 323 seems to be reasonably fast, but just has a more basic feature set. The reviews at Amazon were very mixed, however, indicating also a lot of little software issues and quirks that I really don’t want to live through at home – I expect a special purpose computer to just work. They do run on Linux, after all!

Netgear ReadyNAS RND2000

The Netgear convinced me with a very thorough looking hardware, and got great reviews throughout with very substantial performance numbers. At a price of about 430€ including the two 1 TB drives it also seemed slightly cheaper than the QNAP system, and supports media streaming as well as many other applications. The drives are formated using Netgears proprietary X-RAID, which makes me nervous given that I’d like to keep control of my data and would prefer a standard format of the drives like e.g. Linux EXT3 filesystem in case the device breaks down with no replacement in sight. But that might be a minor nit, I am sure the system delivers well. Why didn’t I get a ReadyNAS then? Well, because then I found the Synology!

Synology Disk Station DS207+

Ok, at the time of writing the successors of this model have already been announced being faster but also more expensive, but the Synology DiskStation DS207+ convinced me: At 430€ including two 1 TB drives, it is at the same price level as the Netgear and the QNAP, but offers in addition to the QNAP the eSata port I was looking for.

But what really quickly made the decision for me was the highly praised web frontend to mange the system – the Synology does provide a modern and easy to use Web-frontend, which makes working with the device and administering it actually fun!

Having the Synology on duty for about 4 weeks now, I must add that also their support and the surprisingly large community is absolutely outstanding! The Synology forums are a great resource for all questions about the functionality, and the dedicated Synology Wiki even contains information about “modding” the little server and installing additional software. Like the other devices in this category you can even get a Linux command prompt via SSH, which is not for the faint of heart, but for a seasoned Unix veteran a nice trait.

Meanwhile I added an installation of the Squeezecenter media server, and bought a Squeezebox Classic streaming client for my living room. I just love it!

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23
Mar 09

Sold off my old Sigma 70-210 f/3.5-4.5 tele-lens

Sigh – nostalgia!

Last week I sold my old first-ever tele-lens on Ebay – I just didn’t touch it anymore now that I have the large high-quality and heavy Sigma 100-300 f/4.

Back in the days when I wasn’t sure if I would use a tele zoom at all – can you imagine? – I decided to go cheap before wasting any serious money and after a quick research session decided that I would get a lightweight (and old, and we’re talking probably about the 80s here!) Sigma 70-210 mm f/3.5-4.5.

I got in on Ebay in August 2005 for about 80€, and now sold it off for 45€. Too bad my Photoshop Elements 5.0 won’t allow me to search (like Lightroom would) for how many photos I took with it in those years, but I found 1714 shots made at exactly 210mm focal length: Most of those had been taken by me with this lens, hoping it would be longer :=).

You will not find much information about this lens on the Internet (at least I didn’t), but build quality and performance were fine for me for a start into the longer focal lengths, looking at it today I’d say

  • Incredibly slow autofocus (gear driven, so it won’t focus on D40, D40x, D60)
  • Noisy screwdriver-type AF
  • Clunky manual focus (but that’s the case with most of the consumer lenses)

On the positive side:

  • Light-weight (ah, I said that already)
  • Sturdy built
  • very nice zoom range on a crop camera
  • Nice macro option for getting close at maximum focal length

And don’t get me wrong, the lens was very well suited for my first attempts at photographing flying birds! Here are some images from the zooom-in class “Artists of the Air” I took in January 2007 led by professional photographer Marion Hogl, all with the little Sigma!

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Ah, the beginnings… Certainly it was not fault of the lens if these images do not hold up to my standards anymore. Though I must admit I like the swans. Still so much to learn….

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1
Mar 09

Card readers – a no-brainer upgrade!

With the upgrade to the D300, I suddenly noticed that the download of the CF cards using my old card reader were, well, painfully slow. Looking at it I realized I had bought the “first best” card reader back in 2004 I had found in a larger department store, and that it was about time to optimize this part of my workflow tool chain… And this time (and probably only this time…) it came much cheaper than I had feared :-)

After a quick Internet research in October 08, I found the fabulous flash memory toolkit software allowing for a quick and easy benchmark of the current situation. So I hooked on my flash card reader, put in the fastest of my cards – a 133x Transcend 4 GByte – and ran the file based benchmark.

Shock.

3.8 MByte/s read speed (25x)? That explained the less than 1 RAW/s feeling, but how could this be? The device – and I remember I had explicitely looked for that – sported a large and friendly “USB 2.0 high-speed-storage” printed on the top. Well, it’s still faster than the 1.5 MBytes/s that USB 1.0 would have allowed, but way below the theoretical 60 MBytes/s USB 2.0 could offer. Note that I did not use an external USB hub, but connected the card reader directly to the computer’s port.

Ok, decision to buy was easy to make at this point, and a more in-depth search of the Internet brought me to the device of choice: A Digisol card reader 47201 I purchased at Amazon.de for – believe it! – 2.89€.

Add 2.90€ for shipping, and I got the cute little white guy for 5.79€. What kind of gear do you get nowadays for this kind of money? Now, of course I was interested if the device would do any better than my old one (or if it could read cards at all), and now look at this:

Problem solved: About 27 MBytes/s for the important “download to computer” category. And man, you can feel the difference ;-)

BTW – anybody understands the speed ratings of the CF cards? AFAIK they are based on CD-ROM drive speed ratings, which traditionally have been specified compared to the speed of a “single speed” music CD. This has been used for data CDs as 150 KBytes/s, although the Music speed really is 44000 Hz with 16 bit times two (stereo) and therefore approx 172 KBytes/s, but who cares. Using the 150 KBytes/s for the Transcend 133x, it should have 19,5 MBytes/s, and not 27 MBytes/s read nor 10 MBytes/s write (and write is more important for the photographer, I’d say). The Transcend website specifies it with 21.5 MBytes/s max!?

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24
Feb 09

Move to Texas?

When thinking about disk space, the old IT insider joke always comes to mind, where a user asks the sysad for more space, and the answer is “Well, why not move to Texas?”.

I still chuckle on this one. It is from the first chapter of the bastard operator from hell series, which we found enormously funny back in University.

Now, I am looking with a frown at my disk space, and have decided to give it a more in-depth look. Having switched from the Nikon D70 with it’s 5 MByte mandatory compressed RAWs to the D300 which happily requires 15 MBytes per RAW, I want to plan ahead:

The chart shows the disk space for each of the four cameras that are or have been in use by me in the last near-five years: The little Canon ixus 40, the workhorse Nikon D70, the backup and lightweight D40, and the new D300. I almost exclusively shoot RAW, and convert JPGs to disk on the computer for my archive managed by Photoshop Elements 5. The RAWs stay on disk as well as the JPGs.

Quick summary: While I added about 36 GBytes in 2005 and 2006, in 2007 and 2008 it was already 60 to 80 GBytes. And it will grow faster with the D300. Free disk space as of today on my main photo drive: 124 GBytes. On the hot mirror drive: 60 GBytes, but only if I remove the backup copy of my MP3s.

Prediction: In 6 months, the hot mirror at the very least will be full and be in need to be replaced by a larger drive (it’s a 400 GB drive now, while the main drive is a 750 GB drive).

The external (shelf-) backup drive is already full, and I have no place to backup the MP3s. I have an unused Hitachi Deskstar 250 GByte SATA drive on my desk, but no external housing for it. That could take the MP3s and other data. Or I’ll just buy a new large external drive, and reuse the existing 250 GBytes external backup for the music files.

Still need a new external backup drive, and some more hard disks in this year. Or maybe finally a NAS?

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21
Jan 09

New gear message: Binoculars!

Having been out birding lately much more often, I recognized the limits of my old Tasco 8×21 pocket binoculars. Now, I had made the mistake during the nature photography days in Fürstenfeldbruck last year to have a look through a nice pair of Zeiss Victory FL glasses! We know since Voltaire that the better is the enemy of the good – those were absolutely positively spectacular. Much more to my liking than the equally priced Swarovskis and Leicas. But completely outside of my budget. Sigh.

So, back to the Internet. What to buy? How much to spend? What are the parameters?

  • Magnification – Ok, there are birders who insist on 10x magnification, but this comes at a price: Loss of brightness, and field of view (viewing angle). I think I can stick with 8x for now.
  • Weight – It adds to the overall backback weight, right? So it better be light. After taking some pairs in my hands and comparing them in terms of weight, I decided that there are some who I find too heavy. “Ok” were those between 500 to 600 grams.
  • Bulkiness – while there are recommendations not to buy roof prism glass in the lower price ranges, I found the porro prism ones (“Traditional style”) to be just too bulky (and usually heavy, too).
  • Handling – as I am wearing glasses, it was important that it has turnable eye caps (not those rubber “flipping” ones) because I want to use it with and without glasses (pushing the glasses up on my head).
  • Price – I set myself the limit of 300€. I had also tested the Zeiss Conquest series, and can confirm that you get more when you pay more, but again those were twice as expensive.

First of all, I was awestruck by the variety of binoculars out there, and the number of manufacturers, each producing a huge array of different models. Quite overwhelming. The demand in binoculars by far outmatched my expectations… :-)

I quickly stumbled upon the Birders of the Cornell University, who did a much better job than me to summarize the parameters and explain what is important on their website – and who actually did really test a large number of models back in 2005 and published the results of their extensive binocular test.

Now, this is an US American test and many of these manufacturers are unknown or hard to get here in Germany, but one model I had already tested and liked myself: The Nikon Monarch series. I had noticed those becaue they not only have the “standard” 8×42 and 10×42 sizes, but also a smaller model 8×36, which saves length (not so much the other dimensions), and more importantly weight.

The German Vögel (“Birds”) magazine had a test of binoculars including the Nikon Monarch in their 01 2009 issue (how convenient!). They claim the resolution of the Monarch is on the lower side compared to the competition, but apart from that attested a high usability and utility. I must admit I didn’t look much further than that, having – invited by the test – also tried an Eschenbach Trophy and found it to be much too heavy.

The real push to buy point was when I found that the street price of the 8×36 Monarch was more like 180€ than the 300€ list price, making it look much more of a bargain in comparison! Decision made, order placed online last Sunday.

The package arrived today, the Monarch is working fine, and I am really looking forward to next weekend to give it a try! The waxwings are in the city, I have heard…

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