Video: How to Choose Birding Binoculars & Their Cost

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Learn how to choose birding binoculars for bird watching in this free bird watching video.

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Video Transcript

Welcome to Expert Village. My name is Wayne Peterson and I direct the Massachusetts Audubon Society, Important Bird Areas Program for Massachusetts. Today we're here at the Daniel Webster Wildlife Sanctuary in Marshfield, Massachusetts we're going to be talking about the equipment needed to get one started in birding. Since arguably binoculars are one of the most important pieces and perhaps one of the most potentially expensive equipment aids that a beginning bird watcher wants to get. It's very that you understand what some of the options are. I have in my hands what was actually my first pair of binoculars, these were a 6 power binocular, they have individual eye piece focus. In oder words instead of being able to focus both lenses at once and they are of a model called Porro Prism. Today I'm using a much more expensive and a much more sophisticated optic, which is called a Roof Prism binocular that has a central focus mechanism so that both of the eye pieces are moving together and in fact all of the mechanized parts are inside as opposed to on the outside. Now, as one can image over time as with cameras and with automobiles, there are various degrees of expenditure and sophistication. Some binoculars can be purchased as little as 150 to $200, middle priced binoculars can be in the middle hundreds of dollars and then for some of the high end binoculars one can be prepared to spend well over a thousand dollars to 12 to $1500. Some of the considerations are brightness, how much illumination they're going to give the subject, what the minimum focal distance is, in order words how close you can get to a subject and focus on it as oppose to looking at something infinity, how quickly the focus mechanism works in order to get you from possibly something as close as a few feet to infinity. If you're somebody like myself who wears eye glasses, you need to think about something called eye relief so that when you put the binoculars to your eyes, you have to remember they are not going to be right up against your eyes and as such there's a tunneling that can occur. So that you want to make sure that the binocular that you're buying is one that has good eye relief. Again, for eye glass wearers lots of binoculars have eye cups that can be pulled out. If you are somebody that doesn't wear eye glasses and they can be turned in, again to maximize that eye relief phenomenon and put your eyes as close to the lens as possible.

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How to Choose Birding Binoculars & Their Cost

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