ORIGINAL: PABowhntr
In all honesty, I think this is your best bet. When you compare this piece of optics equipment to the others you listed I think you can probably make the argument that you could use them quite a bit more than all of the others combined. Their size and overall ease of use are probably the main reasons. With that thought in mind I would recommend upgrading your bins. Considering the distances you are looking at using them at I would also probably suggest a good pair of 10x42s. That particular configuration combines good resolution levels for distance glassing without sacrificing portability.
My only worry is the 10x may be too weak. The crappy Bushnell Porro Prism Zoom Binoculars I have do okay at 7x but when zoomed in to 15x they are pretty poor with the 35mm optic. What can you expect for a $60 binocular though?
Alot of the hunting that I am used to involves sitting on a ridgetop and glassing a valley maybe 1 mile wide or more and even looking at the draws on the other side of it. Sometimes you are able to do this by parking 100 yards behind the edge of the ridge from a road and walking up to the edge and setting up shop and looking,and sometimes you are back in the boonies several miles on foot. The 10x would allow you to see a deer at that distance but you would have a hard time deciding whether it was a large buck or not. If I was able to look at a deer a mile or more away and decide whether it was worth going after, a good spotting scope might pay for itself in saving me the time and effort and frustration of wasting a half a day going after a deer that ends up not being one that I want to shoot.
The 16-48x Nikon spotter would be be great for that type of thing for the times you were able to look without having to pack it in a mile. IF it worked. I'm just worried that it might be like the Busnell binoculars and for only $400 to expect it to go up to 48x zoom with a 60mm optic and keeping a clear view may be too much. The Nikon fieldscopesat 82mm run up to $1,000 pretty quick at a pretty much the same magnification so that leads me to believe that the cheaper Nikon Spotter is probably not very good.
I agree that a good pair of binoculars probably needs to make their way into my gear, as I really don't like the ones I have, but I'm trying to figure out if the spotter would be worth it or not. If the $400 spotter isn't going to be any good, I probably won't be able to bring myself to step up to the $1k+ I would need to get to a good one.
Thanks for the input andreading through my ramblings. I am probably remembering the hunting from my youth with rose colored glasses, but I was able to go do some hunting with my dad off and on over the last 5 or 6 years and I really started to think that some quality gear would really make a difference. We always just had whatever was cheapest and although we usually ended up filling our tags we never were able to really know what the quality of the animal we were going after was, just that it was a deer or elk with or without horns pretty much. This time around I'm going to be trying to locate animals that will be worthy of putting up on the wall.