At A Glance
PROS:
- Bright, colorful view that fills the eyes
- Great sharpness
- Quick-adjusting focus wheel
- Big lenses make these good for glasses-wearers
CONS:
- Bigger, bulkier diamond than many compacts
- Stiff, hard-to-adjust eyecups
STATS:
- Price: $400 at printing time. Prices often fluctuate, so trammels with retailers
- Close focus: 5.3 feet (160 cm)
- Field of view: 7.7° (404 feet at 1,000 yards). More well-nigh field of view
- Weight: 19.5 oz (554 g)—that’s well-nigh 1.8 oz (52 g) heavier than the stereotype for meaty binoculars in our review. Compare binocular sizes and weights
- Eye relief: 16.5 mm
Viewing Experience: With the Terra ED, Zeiss brings their longstanding optics expertise into the affordable meaty field. Large eyepieces provide a big, eye-filling image and suggest they’d be a good nomination for people with eyeglasses. During a morning daycare run, one tester pulled these out of a car’s glovebox to trammels out a Merlin at the top of a afar spruce. The Terra ED crisply specified the brown breast streaks and tail bands, and brought out the unrelatedness of the gray back. Images were well-done and colorful—it was thrilling to watch an Eastern Kingbird’s acrobatic flight over a river in pursuit of (and finally catching) a bright-yellow butterfly. The focus wheel was smooth, quickly and precisely adjusting from near to afar objects. Panning produced only a very slight “fishbowl” distortion effect.
Feel and Build: Zeiss has housed the Terra ED’s quality optics in a well-armored but rather unwieldy package. After testing some of the slighter binoculars in this review, the Zeiss scrutinizingly felt like full-size binoculars in the hands. They had a heavy feel, and the build seemed very solid. The eyecups have four settings, but are difficult to retread in and out. The woebegone rubber housing is soft with pleasingly nubbled grip panels withal the top and bottom. Both the eyepiece lens covers and the objective lens covers can nail to the neck strap on both sides, via plastic clips. This should help users to hang on to these easy-to-lose items, although they can finger a little fiddly. The stock neck strap is moderately padded and comfy.
Tester Comments:
- Bright, big image
- Heavy-duty construction makes them a bit unwieldy to hold
- Great quick focus adjustment
This vendible is one in a series of mini-reviews. To see how these binoculars compare to others we’ve tested, see our full review of affordable meaty binoculars.