OT - binoculars with built in camers

[newshound]

Much cheaper to make up a little plinth for her to stand on. DAMHIK.

[Steve Walker]

Oh no, we are not going there - putting your wife on a pedestal is one step too far!

[The Natural Philosopher]

No, on a DSLR its a mild telehoto. 35mm is about natural size

6x.

I am saying that if you strap a hand held 400mm on a camera you will get blur.

Or with fast enough film speed to go for uber short exposures, grain

You can always enlarge a good lenbs image several toimes as well

staring from false prenises will always lead you to a false conclusion

...Is a fantasy.

Perhaps that should tell you something

[The Natural Philosopher]

No, basically what we are saying and indeed you are saying is that the best stuff for the job doesn't live up to your expectations. In short the world has unobligingly refused to deliver you your dreams.

Try waking up?

Guess why wildlife photographers don't wander around casually snapping at things with their 10x50s

[Tim Lamb]

Speaking from a Brownie box camera expert POV. Is there a marketing opportunity here? What would be the practical difficulty of fitting a digital camera sensor to binoculars and leading the output to a socket feeding a storage device? I understand high magnification, camera shake and exposure time issues but can also see the originators point about the convenience of recording something only seen/found through using binoculars.

[Tim Streater]

It's not for no reason that all those newspaper sports cameramen you see at matches have f****ng great lenses. If your binnies are 10 x 40, say, that's like having a 350mm lens on a digital camera (a proper sized one, I mean). The f-number of this will be very bad, meaning you have to operate it wide open (poor depth of field), or you have to crank up the sensor's ISO number (basically, turning the gain up) to an extent that, to avoid a blurry image due to camera shake, the image is noisy as f*ck (coloured speckles all over it).

Remember that the eye+brain combo is very good at image processing, and binnies are very well suited for use with the human eye. In astronomy they have much larger optics for light-gathering and can, of course, track the target and keep the shutter open for long periods of time.

Hand held binnies for snapping with *demand* a very short shutter exposure (without a tripod, anyway), and that would put huge constraints on the other things you can vary. I'm sure it's doable but not cheap.

[Tim Lamb]

Yebbut. My ancient Olympus digital camera has a lens around 6mm diameter, and smaller still on i-phones etc. They still manage pin sharp images. The message seems to be that reducing the field of view, limits the light input and increases the necessary exposure time. ( I am not a photographer:-) Nevertheless, this doesn't seem to match the apparent performance of relatively cheap digital stuff.

[David]

Not used one, then?

[David]

Two very quick search results to show that binoculars with a camera are a product and not always expensive. I'm not proposing these two, just showing that the products are about.

An example of a review site which gives opinions but doesn't inspire me with total confidence given the small number of devices reviewed.

Still nobody who has tried one.

Cheers

Dave R

[Tim Streater]

Wrong tool for the job, I'd say.

[Tim Streater]

Those smaller cameras have much smaller sensors, so have much smaller lenses. The images you take on a smaller camera, and particularly on a phone, will be fairly wide angle, so they appear not bad at all.

Take a picture of your friend's face (ONLY their face) with a smartphone without zooming it, then try one using say a 50 or 85 mm lens on a camera which has an APS-C or full-frame sized sensor. You'll see that the former gives your friend a HUGE nose, while the latter gives a nice faithful picture. This is the problem with using a wide-angle lens for portrait photos. Now try standing 30 yards from your friend, zooming your phone's camera and try taking the same face-only. Good luck.

[Adrian Caspersz]

If it helps, I haven't tried one.

There is an old lady in a house a few doors down from me.

She hasn't tried one, either.

:-p

You need to find a read/write community of users. Bird watching is a major interest, so they should be forums for that, I'd expect.

[Adrian Caspersz]

[Andrew]

wrong. 50/55 mm is correct for a 35mm film, or full-frame DSLR.

35mm is 'normal' for DSLRs with smaller sensors.

A 50mm lens on an APS-C cmos sensor DSLR will be a slight telephoto

[The Natural Philosopher]

I am sure nikon could knock up something in the 5grand level or so

But fitting autofocus auto exposure user selectable film speed , a memory card holder and a usb plug and vibration reduction in a pair of binocs would probably render them too heavy for usability, too expensive to risk and in any case inferior to a digital camera

[Roger Hayter]

I think when you use binoculars your postural muscles, arm muscles, eye muscles, eyes and brain are doing a highly complex job of image 'stabilisation' at several different levels and speeds which would be very hard for an internal camera to work with. I agree the OPs suggestion would be very nice to have. My guess is that it has been tried and found to be too hard. Users would be very disappointed if it only worked with static targets with the binoculars braced and not with the sort of moving target binoculars are so useful for.

[Steve Walker]

I don't see it being a great problem, when relatively cheap video cameras are offering both optical and digital stabilisation at zoom ratios far higher than most binoculars can achieve.

[John Rumm]

I suspect if you have googled for what you seek, you will have found that there are no products out there that meet your particular requirements. Yes there are binos with inbuilt cameras, but many of them are limited to HD video resolutions, and don't make particularly good stills cameras.

Now this is not just a case of the internet conspiring to hide stuff from you, or us just being mean, or not understanding your question. It's a reflection of the fact that as with many photography related things, its all about the compromise, and the binocular format places place significant limitations on the design of an embedded digital camera.

In short it means you can't have what you want exactly, and a "proper camera" is likely to be the only option. As you highlight, a traditional DSLR and adequate lens is likely to be big and expensive to cart around, so the smaller integrated zoom cameras would probably be a better starting point.

[AnthonyL]

Do you not think this would do a job?

[John Rumm]

It probably would... but then again that is in effect a dedicated compact digital camera with long zoom capability, and not a pair of binoculars. (although it is packaged in a more traditional "non camera" looking format)

At £1,650 it's also more than twice the price of a Nikon COOLPIX P1000 or similar...