WRO,
Dunno who you are, but my real name is public on this site. For a "stumphumper magazine writer" I do a have a little knowledge of optics, having published two books on the subject, the first of which was considered a major reference for many years,.
Aside from using a pile of optics over several decades, have visited several optics factories and had many discussions with their engineers. Oh, and was the first optics columnist for a major hunting magazine, starting 25 years ago with Petersen's Hunting, one reason I've been able to look through hundreds of different binoculars.
I can throw around terms like chromatic aberration with the best of them, but part of what I normally do when evaluating binoculars is compare their view with the closest magnification/objective size binocular from the so-called Big Three, in both "normal" and dim light. If that's not possible, I have several dozen other binoculars on hand from various manufacturers, so am usually able to make a comparison with other binoculars on the same price-class. I often ave other people make the same sorts of comparisons, and even if most aren't as quite as optically sophisticated as you, their opinions do count for something, because after all most optics are sold to average people.
I also am quite familiar with the old Bruntons, and agree they weren't nearly worth the price at the time. But optics have changed since then.
I'm sure you do, Typically reading field and stream, petersens, etc.. A lot of them have no clue what they are looking at or how to evaluate optics. Case in point, the Zeiss terra being the optic of the year a few years ago. The only thing worse IMHO than the terras are my daughters Dora the Epxlorer glasses, and I still think they may have a little better QC.
