Keeping steady

The ‘Vibration Canceller’ is Vixen’s name for its image-stabilisation system. In each light path, there is a gimbal-mounted prism system that is controlled by gyroscopic sensors and small motors. It compensates for high-frequency vibration with a magnitude of up to about 3°, ie the shakiness that reduces your ability to resolve fine detail. The system is good enough, and the binoculars are light enough, to enable you to hold them with one hand, freeing the other for notes.

The system is activated with a lever on a rotary toggle switch (which is a little small for gloved fingers). A green LED indicator, which is visible when you take the binoculars away from your eyes, alerts you if you have left it switched on but, to preserve battery life, it also times out after five minutes of no motion. The ‘Vibration Canceller’ works well with slow panning across the sky, but large fast movements can induce some ‘overshoot’, which is disconcerting, but it damps down within less than a second.