FUJINON HYPERCLARITY 8X42 £770
This Japanese-made binocular is very well built, and is fairly bulky, with a magnesium alloy body, a milled metal focusing wheel and dioptre ring. It is very good to handle, well balanced and didn’t feel heavy.
It’s armoured, waterproof and fog-proof and has water-repellent coating on the exterior lens surfaces. The dioptre is a simple twist ring – it’s not calibrated or locking, and the eyecups twist up and down with a very good action and one intermediate position. There’s 18mm of eye-relief which should be plenty for glasseswearers – 15mm is the minimum you should look for. The single finger-wide focusing wheel moves smoothly and fairly stiffly, clockwise towards infinity, through 3¼ turns.
To my eyes the Hyper-Clarity image is ‘clean, white and cool’. Sharpness is very good, though perhaps not quite as good at long range. I did, however, sometimes notice an obvious, narrow ring of peripheral softness.
Brightness is good and this binocular won’t let you down in low light. The field of view is very good (8°) and I didn’t detect any chromatic aberration, owing, in part at least, to some ED glass. The spec for this binocular quotes its close-focus as 2m. These figures aren’t always accurate – and I found the reality to be much better – I measured it at just under 145cm which is very good indeed – perhaps more should be made of this in the marketing.
I did sometimes have to ‘hunt’ for best focus – this may improve given more time with the binocular, and in lower temperatures I found the eyecups somewhat cold.
VERDICT
Impressive build quality, feels good in the hands and is well balanced. The image is very good, albeit with a little edge softness, and it performed well in low light. The view is wide, chromatic aberration is well corrected and the close-focus is very good.
SPECS: Eye relief: 18mm Field of view: 8°/136m @1000m Close focus: 2m (quoted) Weight: 786g Length x width x depth: 139x130x54mm
RRP: £770 Warranty: 1yr Supplied with: Case (no strap attachment points), rainguard, objective covers (not tethered), strap Web: fujifilm.com