With luck and discernment, you might win for less. If you've got $1000 you can be quite confident. If you've got $300 to spend you can be fairly confident of good precision, function, and durability. Look through somebody else's binocular and you'll see what I mean. Poor alignment of the two telescopes and focus knobs that function poorly are common complaints. But, quality control in modern cheapies is, to make possibly the understatement of the year, not up to the standard of Leitz. Coatings have improved dramatically so that even cheap newer models will give an image that is, by comparison, brilliant.

The precision of optical adjustment in these old things is second to none, so as ON says the image will be 'sharp'.īut people mostly agree that 6x is not quite enough, that the quickness of center focusing is essential to ID many figety birds, and that uncoated or early partly coated binoculars give a view so dreary it always looks like rain.Īs a functional 'birder' your elegant old Leitz would be badly beat by almost any new binocular costing $100, provided you get a good sample. Of course, you can see a heck of a lot of detail at a distance through it. One marvels that you came to have such an interesting antique as your sole instrument. If you are fledged as a birder, you have already molted as a binofile! Top make binoculars of that vintage were fine in a way that very few new things are.

E leitz wetzlar binoculars 6x30