Review: Nikon's 82MM Monarch Spotter

[Turbulent Turtle]

TT, Send me your suggestion's. I recently commented on how nice it would be to have a direct connection between your camera and spotter too. I will be happy to pass on your suggestion's to the guy's who ocme up with new products for the Sport Optic's side of Nikon.

In order to remain within the realm of this wonderful spotting scope and its thread, I will simply mention that for this awesome spotter, the only two adapters that Nikon has for digiscoping are for a) the Coolpix Series and b) The Nikon 1 lenses.

Coolpix? Nikon 1? Really?

Nothing for the DSLRs. For shame. And to add insult to injury, it appears you must buy a special eyepiece for digiscoping.

I believe only the EDG series of spotting scopes has a method to attach directly to the F-mount of a Nikon DSLR and it's very pricey.

Kowa does a much better job for a lot less money. Happy to discuss it further on a separate thread or via PM. Depends if others are interested.

 

[Ledd Slinger]

Funny guy. That's afocal digiscoping. The device I got from Kowa is an photo connector the replaces the lens on my Nikon as it connect directly to a T adapter in the F-mount of the camera. The other side of that connector attaches directly to the Kowa scope using that thread you see around the eyepiece junction to the spotter body. I use the 20-60X eyepiece in the Kowa and it focuses the picture directly to the sensor after going through one lens in the connector.

So instead of a camera taking a picture of the image in the eyepiece, like how a riflescope works for all intents and purposes, the camera sensor replaces the eye behind the eyepiece. It does not work with the LER eyepiece for obvious reasons, but it works very well with the 20-60X zoom eyepiece.

In essence, I just mounted the equivalent of a 1000-3000mm f/14 zoom lens on my camera.

Nice. That sounds like quite the setup! I bet that takes some pretty nice photos through the spotter

 

[Turbulent Turtle]

It's pretty neat. You can see the video I took of the 1000 yard line at Bayou Rifles with the bullet traces. This was done with that setup in February of this year. I mounted the Kowa and the attached Nikon DSLR on my tripod, focused and composed using live view, then I just let it record for 20 minutes. It made an HD movie. I'm thinking I could get a little better exposure settings, but we were running out of time so I left it alone. I think it was zoomed to 40X.

View it here.

http://img.gg/J9Jdqto

 

[Ledd Slinger]

Pretty cool ive only ever taken photos, but that's what I want to start doing for hunting. Have my spotting scope set up on the animal recording HD video with my phone as I take the shot. Even if the animal moves, it's pretty easy to follow it looking through the phone screen. I plan on doing some shooting at longer ranges tomorrow morning. Think I'll make a video to see how it turns out.