VIKING 8X42 OSPREY £499

Aworkhorse of a binocular. Its rubber armour has very light stippling and there are small thumb indents on the underside. It’s waterproof and nitrogen-filled and felt well balanced in the hand. At 695g, this isn’t heavy.

The dioptre, a milled twist-ring under the right eyepiece, is stiffer to move than most. The focusing wheel is also milled, one finger-wide, and moves very smoothly, with moderate resistance, through very nearly two revolutions, anti-clockwise to see the furtheraway birds. The rubber-coated twist-up eyecups have two intermediate positions and one of the best actions I’ve encountered.

At 18.4mm eye-relief is generous – glasses wearers should not have a problem here.

The view of this Osprey is big, clean and bright with good colours and very good sharpness. There was no distracting edge softness, chromatic aberration seemed very well corrected and with a 65° apparent field of view, this binocular hits the Japanese standard for ‘wide-angle’ (Europeans call 60° wide-angle). Its quoted 2m close-focus is good, but I thought it was significantly better. I checked its low light performance after sunset on one of those ‘climate change oven’ days in midAugust, with about 70% high cloud cover.

The Osprey was still seeing colour in the shadows 20 minutes after sunset. Ten minutes later that view was more like monochrome, but away from the shadows colours and shades of green were still being picked up.

Sharpness is very good, but I did sometimes find myself ‘hunting’ with the focus to get things crisp. And as the sun went down there was a bit of flare when looking into the light and with side light.

VERDICT

Well made with very good mechanics, glass that does a very good job, a wide-angle view and a much better than quoted close-focus.

SPECS: Eye relief: 18.4mm Field of view: 8.12°/141.7m@1,000m Close focus: 2m (quoted) Weight: 695g Size: 145x130mm RRP: £499 Warranty: 10yr Supplied with: Lightly padded case, strap, rainguard, objective covers, optics cleaning kit Web: vikingopticalcentres.co.uk