It's tough to answer your question because bino's are like camera's. You can buy a wide variety of quality and size, lens differences, etc.

One thing that I learned during the reading I did was that you do a little math to determine which binoculars are the best in low light.

Here's the deal, as I understand it.

Your eye is sort of like a 4 mm lens, so the binocular that has a 4 mm "exit pupil" will let the most light through to your eye in low light conditions (something that I was concerned about...using the bino's in low light to hunt)

How can you tell what the exit pupil is for a pair of binoculars, when you want a 4.0 or so for low light?

A bino at 8x42? You take 42 divided by 8 and get an "exit pupil" of over 5.0...a very good low light binocular.

On the other hand a 10x25 will have an exit pupil of only 2.5 (25 divided by 10)...so it won't be quite as good in low light.

You don't need an exit pupil much larger than 4.0 because the human eye will only allow so much light through its lens.

For what it's worth, I wanted a pair for deer and turkey hunting...not a sport where I need to glass a long long way off...I wanted to spend less than $100, and weight and size were a consideration. I bought a pair of Nikon Travelite V, 7x21 (thus an exit pupil of 3.0). A good trade-off of price, power, weight, quality, low light performance, and compact size.

You also take the exit pupil size and square it to arrive at the "brightness rating" which is essentially the same thing. Thus an exit pupil rating of 3 would have a brightness ratingo of 9, while an exit pupil rating of 4 would have a brightness rating of 16. (If I remember correctly, it's been a while since I researched this stuff.)



I got them on sale for $69 at Dick's Sporting Goods, a retail chain. You can also find them in Cabela's, I believe.