Bresser 10-30x60 Zoom Binoculars - not as bad as I presumed.

[NobodyReally]

Before purchasing any binoculars for astronomy, I took good note of the vitriol heaped upon the zoom binocular.   The problem is that I'm innately curious and wanted to both see just how bad they were and take them apart to see how they worked.  Several years after good use from my Bresser 8x56 and Celestron 15x70, I finally gave into temptation and bought a pair of  10-gazillionx70 binos for a fraction of their postage cost.  I am pleased to report that they were every bit as bad as every reviewer said.   Totally useless even for daylight viewing. 😁

However, my brain thought it saw a recent uptick in Bresser zooms with a far more realistic magnification range and, given how good my 8x56 are and favourable comments on Bresser's bargain-basement binos, my curiosity bit last week on a very cheap pair of 10-30x60 zooms.   I did a brief daylight check, which showed they produced a reasonably bright image, focused nicely in the centre third.  Zoom adjustment was easy, but focusing for sharpness was fiddly.  Much better than my previous collection of glass masquerading as an optical instrument, but not, of course, as good as a decent fixed mag bino.  Zoom is a nice and useful feature, though.  At first I thought there was something wrong with their collimation or with the left ocular; however, it turned out that I needed to have a much wider feeling interpupillary distance than I'm used to.   The right eyepiece adjustment was sufficiently large to cater for the large difference in my eye's prescriptions.  I'm afraid I just don't like viewing with glasses on.

Naturally, the curse of the new binos struck and the local weather has been unsuited to star gazing (... given that I live in suburban Glasgow, all I can think is that a lot people around here must buy new binoculars on a regular basis!).    However, last night there was a brief interlude in the cloud activity and the skies cleared sufficiently to show Orion low on the horizon, so I dashed in to get the new zooms.  There was a bright, near-full Moon, wind, some clouds scudding across or cycling in and out of existence, and the usual Scottish Central Belt skyglow that presents me with triple-digit Bortle number viewing.   I won't bother mentioning my local council's penchant for street lights that could double as WW2 anti-aircraft searchlights - nosiree, not going to mention them at all, especially not that 3 MW bright white one on the street corner.

So, it was with some double surprise that I had quite a nice view of M42 with clear evidence of nebulosity.  Zooming in to max still gave an adequate image.   Stars elsewhere were sharp in the centre and didn't blur as much as I thought they would near the edges.   However, I did notice that the brighter stars weren't as sharp as the more average ones.   I had a brief look at the Moon.   It didn't look bad at lower magnifications but it was more difficult to get a satisfactory image at full mag.  At that point, the weather noticed what I was doing, hurriedly put out it's cigarette, swilled the dregs of its coffee, pulled the chain, and and rustled up some rain.

So, my first impression was "Not bad and much better than expected.  I'll stick to my regulars for normal stargazing, but I'll give them a go for evening strolls where they can multirole for general observation and opportunistic skygazing.  They're certainly much better than that pair of cheap 10x42s I bought for that purpose." .  

Does anybody else have any experience of using these, rebadged versions of the same, or other adequate zooms?