I'm on the market for a spotting scope, I already have an old 20x50 soviet scope (ZRT-460) which does the job but I'd like a bit more magnification, 30x would be fine, but not lot more bulk. Budget is minimal as is my expectation on overall quality. Use would be to keep a close eye on a spot located at 70 meters far away in dim electric light conditions, no fine details needed.Pic related is a cheap (50 euros on Amazon) 25-75x60 spotting scope, there are many others around the same shape and size and specs, review are more or less all coherent with what one can expect from a cheap spotting scope: decent at lower magnification, becomes crappy the higher you go and purple fringing kicking in the stranger the light becomes. So I'm not sure if it's an step up compare to my soviet scope or not, more magnification would be there and possibly more light due to the 60mm front lens. What do?
>>107253646>>>/k/
>>107253646This is a question for /k/ or /out/ or even /p/ considering they are going to know who makes the best refractory lenses.
>>107253646Cheap scopes are garbage scopes.Magnification doesn't mean much when the image is blurry and full of color fringing - you'd see more with decent quality binoculars.If you really need low light performance on a budget I think the best option is a "Lens2Scope" adapter for photographic lenses and a cheap but fast 2nd hand lens like a 50mm f/1.8 or 80mm f/2Still going to cost like $200 but at least it's not $2000.
>>107253683>considering they are going to know who makes the bestSwarovsky and Kowa.
>>107253660>>107253683Strangely enough /k/ didn't even came to mind, /p/ has a rule that gear threads are discouraged but permitted and spotting scopes aren't even able to take photos. Sorry.>>107253746I know quality would be high, I'd be content if it would be on par with my current scope. I'm not going to use it that much so budget has to be low. But I didn't even knew the Lens3scope concept, I have some old 35mm lens so it's worth investigating, thanks, this has been useful!
>>107253841go on aliexpress to celestrons official store and have a look around (iirc their store is named something like "tianyuan star optics" or something). the 80-150usd range is amazing value and they have quite a decent range
>>107255634Thanks for the advice, anon.
>>107253646>>107253746Quality optics means more than nX magnification, I know first hand after buying cheap binoculars on eBay and comparing them to some decent Bushnell 10x
