Thank you so much. Very helpful. Of the two Minox scopes you’ve listed, would I gain any low light Advantage going with the larger 56mm?
The 56 won't appear to be any brighter given equal exit pupils. The only edge you may gain is being able to use a sightly higher magnification and transferring a tad more detail to your eye. But those differences are minimal and almost impossible to detect in the field. When you get to glass of this quality level, a 50mm objective has proven to be more than sufficient for my usage. In fact, my favorite low-light scope overall is the Docter Basic 2.5-10x50 or its twin (Noblex Vario N4 2.5-10x50).
One other thought on higher magnifications: An overlooked facet is AO/SF. With very shallow depth of field in poor lighting, there can be occasions when more precise focus of the image can be beneficial, though I can only think of one single situation when I actually took advantage of SF. I was using a ZE5i 3-15x56 and was having a tough time discerning the edges and positioning of a moonlight coyote as it was blending into the frost-burned winter grass.
