Binoculars, image quality or size?

[jorn]

I went in to a large optical store yesterday. I have been looking for a dissent set of binoculars preferably with a dia of 70mm or larger. I did the huge mistake of looking in to a zeiss binocular. The quality was impressive, they even looks sharper than real life. The various binoculars costing less than 150$ looked unimpressive. I ended up buying a pair of 10x50 Nikon binoculars. They had really good quality. So the question is, was i wrong testing image quality in daylight? Would the result seem totally different gazing at the night sky?

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Yes and no: stars are very unforgiving because they show up any aberration quite distinctly. I find my good old Bresser 10x50 is better quality-wise than the 15x70. It is clearly more comfortable to look through. The Nikon will no doubt out-perform my Bresser. Having said that, the 15x70 shows far more DSOs than the 10x50. So in practice I use the 15x70 more for astronomy, and the 10x50 more in daylight.