Fclass spotting scope

[nfa1eab]

You might as well buy once/cry once.. otherwise you'll be selling a 601 and buying a 82SV or Prominar within 6-8 months.

I have been shooting highpower and more recently LR prone since the early 1990s. i bought a Kowa TSN-821 in 1995 and have used it ever since. It was quite painful back then, as I remember it costing almost $600 for the body only. I added a 27x LER eyepiece and have been very pleased. It just keeps on working. In the last few years the rubberized coating has become sticky and gooey. I emailed Kowa and was told immediately to send it in and they would refinish the scope. They also provided a loaner 82SV until my scope comes back. Customer service unheard of these days for most products. Today I think an 82Sv is about $670. Seems like a bargain to me. Buy a Kowa, you'll never be disappointed or second guess your decision.

My $.02

 

[Turbulent Turtle]

I started a thread on the optics column a while back about how I found a new eyepiece for my Celestron scope. I wanted to use it for F Class to monitor mirage and the standard zoom lens did not have enough distance from eye to eyepiece. I found from a true optics expert that inexpensive scopes do not really have a problem with the quality of the main lenses in the scope but do with the eyepieces. So, I found a company named Bader Planitarium in Germany that made combinations of their eyepieces that would fit my scope. I used their Classic Ortho 18mm eyepiece as well as an adapter to fit it to my Celestron model. Some of my shooter friends looked through my "new" scope and couldn't tell any difference to their expensive scopes.
I have since found that the Bader zoom lens for my Celestron was equally good. However, my eyepiece and adapter combination cost about $100 total and a new Bader zoom is about $300!

That's a very good point. The large lens on spotting scope is indeed a little easier to form and it's nowhere near as complex as the eyepiece. However, since it is the lens that receives the initial picture, whatever is produced by it, cannot be improved from that point forward. The erector inside will flip the image so we do not have to stand on our head to correctly view the image through the eyepiece.

The eyepiece itself is the one that does most of the magnification, and a good zoom eyepiece gets more expensive. For my Kowa 82SV, I have the LER eyepiece for shooting and the zoom for digiscoping. I am thinking about the wide angle one as well for a wider viewing angle.

 

[paulT]

Is anyone using the kowa 17HE 27x LER with their kowa series 820/824 models kowa spotting scope and find the finner mirage detail on par with the newer 17HD 25/27 LER Eyepiece with their kowa spotter.