KOWA PROMINAR TSN-99A £3,449 (with TE-11WZII zoom eyepiece)

With a 99mm objective lens, it’s big, and you’re going to feel the extra weight.

The image produced is very bright, and very sharp right to the edges, with excellent contrast and very natural colour. The eyepiece really showed its quality on a murky evening, scanning distant waders on a gravel pit.

That huge objective lens still creates a very bright image, and even zoomed right in to 70x, it was sharp and didn’t feel restrictive. You do notice every little wobble, but it still felt far more usable than maximum magnification on many scope/eyepiece set-ups. Colourfringing was tough to find.

The eyepiece twists up and down to four positions, and offers a maximum of 17mm eye relief.

Wide angle hardly does it justice, because the view feels incredibly ‘walk-in’, so expansive is it, and the image is sharp, with totally natural colour, and no colour-fringing. Magnification is 40x, too, with the TSN-99, so you have all the punch you need for most situations. I did find it very slightly harder to find precise focus than with the zoom, but I can’t really see any reason why that should be, so perhaps it was just fatigue setting in on my part.

The build is excellent, and very much along the lines of the existing Prominar scopes. There are two focus wheels, mounted centrally above the barrel, with the main one being a finger and a half wide, and the fine focus wheel just over a finger wide. They’re well ridged and easy to use, but if I’m being picky I’d like just a little more separation between the two.

The wheels move very smoothly and moderately stiffly, with the main one taking two turns from close focus to infinity. Close focus, is 6m, but that’s not really what you’re buying this scope for.

You do need to make sure you have a good, very solid tripod, ideally with a large baseplate, and you may decide you need some sort of scope harness or pack, too.

VERDICT

An exceptional scope.

It is reasonably heavy, but that shouldn’t put you off at all if you set yourself up properly.

SPECS: Length: 378mm Weight: 1,810g Field of view: 39m@1,000m (WA eyepiece) Close focus: 6m Eye relief: 17mm (both eyepieces) Website: kowaoptic.com