Customer Reviews:
 Exactly what I wanted! March 16, 2008
O.R.
I received it a few days ago and must say: I meets the description quite well. The image is (if focused correctly off course) very sharp from center to the edge, clear, bright and sports a surprisigly large field of view compared to other monoscopes I've tested so far.
There is off course the issue whith the very shallow depth of field at macro distance. But this is due to physics. To increase the depth of field you would have to close an iris inside the scope and that would make the image darker. (No, the scope does not have one)
Read the description carefully (maybe also on the minox home page) to see if this is what you want.
Excellent Quality Monocular October 6, 2007
Kodiak (Bondurant, WY)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The Minox 8X25 is a great tool with very decent light capturing ability allowing good use in early morning and late evening. It is lightweight enough for me to carry frequently on mountain excursions. I found it easy to focus and I like its resistance to weather. The small stuffsack that comes with it is a little fumbly and really doesn't readily protect the entire unit quite as well as it could. If I could make one improvement, it would be to have removeable lense protectors. All in all, this is an excellent tool for me and is worth the extra expense compared to cheaper models. One thing to remember, .. a monocular is neither a set of binoculars nor a spotting scope and is more of a special use tool - lightweight compromise for telescopic viewing.
 Not what I expected. July 17, 2007
Richard Theobald (Phoenix, AZ USA)
3 out of 6 found this review helpful
I thought this would be easier to handle than binoculars when I have a camera in the other hand. I was wrong about that. A monocular needs two hands to focus, and it is much harder to get on target and even harder to pan, as it doesn't lock into your eye sockets like a binocular. I also thought it would give me a hand-lens view of an insect but from 15 inches away, and it doesn't. The insect is magnified, though not 8 times, but it looks far away, so you don't see much detail.
This monocular has several design weaknesses. The eye-cup is only 3/4 inch in diameter, so instead of sitting on the bones around the eye, it pokes you in the eyeball, so you have to try to hold it at the right distance from the eye, and so much light enters the eyepiece and reflects off the lens that the image is severely degraded. The eyepiece lens is very small and the eye has to be precisely in the center of the lens to see the whole field of view. The focus ring needs less than one turn lock-to-lock, but at 2 inches diameter that takes a lot of finger movement. The killer is that just a barely detectable movement takes you from crisp to fuzzy, then just a litle more and you are so far off focus that there is nothing identifiable in the entire field of view, and it's like that for almost the whole focussing range. So at first look, turning the wheel a quarter turn each way won't tell you which way to go, and if you turn the focus too fast you zip past the correct setting without even noticing it. With careful setup and the right light, the optics seemed to have excellent resolution and contrast, but in the field I found this much too difficult to use.
Not even close July 5, 2007
S. Mason (Indyucky - USA)
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
I like to keep a small monocular in my truck for the times I do not have binoculars with me. I have tried several small and MUCH less expensive models over time and was never very pleased with them. I knew I was buying on the low end, and therefore getting low end performance.
I recently decided to go ahead and spend the money and get a good one. Knowing Minox cameras and other optics I figured that even though this was more than I wanted to spend even for a good one, at least I could put my quest to an end.
Not even close.
Nicely packaged and light enough, but slow and difficult to focus and sharpness / contrast was none to only MODERATELY better than the $40 Bushnell model I am currently using.
If I did not know the prices or the manufacturers and was given these and my Bushnell to test, and was then told that these were ... let's say... $10 more than the Bushnell... I would buy the Bushnell.
This is NOT an endorsement for my cheap Bushnell, as they are not great. It is just that these are only marginally better clarity, brightness, and NO better contrast, for about 4 times the price.
As for the macro capability, yes it does focus closer than the others I have used, but still with less than stellar clarity in any light. In anything other than bright direct sunlight it was difficult to use.
Being from Minox, I was VERY surprised.
Thanks to Amazon's return policy I was able to return them very easily.
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