Revelation 20x80 review

[jamespels]

Hi all,

I finally got round to buying a decent pair of bins last week (Revelation 20x80, £40 from Astroboot; old style without the cross-brace; came with soft carry case, lens cloth and a plastic mount adaptor).

First impressions: surprisingly light for the size but no something you would want to hold up for more than a few minutes - too heavy to keep steady for more than a few seconds. The rubber eypieces are excellent - folded fully out they are fine for people with no specs, the first fold is perfect for some very thin lensed glasses I wear and, folded fully back, they are great for some thinker prescription sunglasses I wear.

Build quality is generally good, but I am not very happy with the eye-pieces which are flimsily held onto the focusing adjuster bar by plastic parts. These are so bendy each EP can move backward and forward through a range of about 2mm. This isn't obvious in use but the right hand EP comes so far out when focusing on near objects that it "drops" off its guides and out of alignment by about 1mm - this means big eye-strain and holding the EP back in alignment when you focus on something further away. Not much of an issue for astro work but worth nothing. May be a one-off with this pair, an issue with the older style bins or a general Rev 20x80 issue - I cannot tell but will be asking Scopes n Skies next week.

I have mounted them on an old Manfrotto camera tripod - very heavy duty and I wouldn't recommend anything less. The L-adaptor that Revelation provided is totally under-spec for these bins - they are almost impossible to keep still and oscillate from side to side for to to three minutes (really!) if you knock them even slightly. However, I wouldn't expect any more from inject-moulded plastic and have a metal replacement on order.

Next impression - first light (terrestrial). On the hill about half a mile away there are a couple of electricity pylons. These are quite often in silhouette against white clouds and make an excellent check for chromatic aberrations. My old pair of bins (cheap pair of 7-14x zoom 40mm) showed every colour of the rainbow, and then some. The Revelations show very slight green tingeing to one side but nothing obvious on the other. More general obsering looking at some of the local birdlife showed crystal clear colours - I have never seen a goldfinch look so good - and great depth perception in the fields and hedges. Not much I can say other than that!

First light - astro. I have been out this evening going through some of the Lunar 100. The moon is about 5/8 so not great for anything on the eastern half but it is clear the Revs are good for up to about no 30 or thereabouts. Beyond that they do not have enough magnification but then it is only 20x! Clarity on the moon is great - no CA or obvious distortion at all - but I did find it hard to keep both eyes in focus. Left eye slightly forward against the rubber and the right one comes back and vice versa. Definitely taking this up with SnS! Sadly the cloud was rolling in about 10:30 pm so I have not had a chance to look at anything else. However, before I packed up I had a quick scan to the East to see what I could see (skies still to bright to see anything with the naked eye) and picked out what I think was Altair and Tarazad in Aquila. Either way the slightly higher star had a distinct reddish tinge and the lower one was about white (this was against a distinctly blue sky so I wouldn't expect to see anything else). This doesn't prove a huge amount, other than to say that colours seem to be displayed very well.

I will continue this review as an when I get a chance for some late night observing but, suffice to say for now, this is a very good pair of bins for general observing barring the eyepiece issue.

J.