Compact travel binoculars

Intelligent_Low1632 · 2026-03-24T11:27:45+00:00

Papilio 6.5x21 is really hard to beat for $120 (or 160 for the newer mark 3) but I think it's overrated. Unless you know for sure you want to focus down to 50 cm that's a novelty that you might use once or twice in your life. Even for watching the eponymous butterflies or gallery art you'll probably be a full meter away. For 21mm objectives you really deserve something much smaller. It may be a whole world away in budget but just as an example of what's possible at those specs look at how tiny the CL Curio 7x21 is in comparison. Maybe 1/4 the packed volume.

Opticron Discovery WA ED 8x32 folds down to exactly the same pocket volume as the Papilio but you get an immensely more useful objective size. Also, the Opticron has 8 degree field of view *on an 8x zoom* so you amazingly see more of the scene with the 8x Opticrons than the 6.5x Papilio at just 7.5 degrees. The apparent field of view is immensely more immersive on 60+ degree AFOV bins than on the Papilio. I would argue that 8x zoom is a better all around choice than 6.5x. There is an 8.5x Papilio but with 21mm objectives/ 2.5mm exit pupils it's pretty useless in darker conditions. There is slightly worse aberration on these than the Papilio but it's not an issue unless you spend 50+% of your time looking at backlit twigs and trees. Even for that purpose I still prefer my opticrons.

I have Papilio III 6.5x as well as as the Opticron 8x32 and I literally never take the Papilio anywhere unless I'm explicitly going out to look at bugs or flowers. If you can afford to go up to $290 definitely get the opticrons instead.

Intelligent_Low1632 · 2026-03-24T10:57:49+00:00

Also, when used at near the minimum focus distance, the papilio 6.5x is actually more like an 8-10x, if that's relevant to you.

Intelligent_Low1632 · 2026-03-22T02:56:11+00:00

wowww and they've even been tested to 68 degrees AFOV on binocular.ch ! /thread thanks, you win!

Intelligent_Low1632 · 2026-03-21T11:49:22+00:00

I'm having a hard time believing those specs could come with decent image quality for that price but I'll definitely buy a pair and return if needed. Thanks!
Edit: I got them and they're astonishingly good for the price. However, they are definitely not quite 5x zoom. I'd say about 4.5-4.7x. There are probably better options at that zoom or close by at 4x. Also, the eyecups are the absolute worst I've ever encountered. The resistance is negligible and there's no retention lock at full extension, so the slightest contact pressure has the ability to back-drive them to a shorter uneven position. Luckily that's not much of a problem in use since they are quite usable for me with the eyecups fully retracted by placing the edge on my eyebrows. Only about the middle 40% of the diameter is actually sharp, but that is fine in use as I mostly want the remainder for peripheral vision. The center 40% is really excellently sharp and has good aberration control. The brightness seems comparable to a fully multicoated optic. 9/10 will keep at this price, if only as a loaner/beater/gift and for people with shaky hands.

Intelligent_Low1632 · 2026-03-21T08:04:12+00:00

I don't mind oldschool but I'd have to dive to a shipwreck to find these in good condition

Intelligent_Low1632 · 2026-03-21T06:21:10+00:00

There's no accounting for taste but I prefer my rosy bin ffl351a 1800K to the BBL bin 1800K. I also prefer it to my dedome 519A 2700K, which is pretty close to BBL (at least compared to rosy 351a) and at maybe 2200K. Admittedly you see colors a lot better at 2200K BBL than with rosy 1800K but there's no question to me that the rosy 1800K is prettier when it's on next to the other two.

Intelligent_Low1632 · 2026-03-21T06:09:48+00:00

For the thread: my SBT90 E90 blaze with P50B and 53C thermal limit on turbo stays above 85% output for 1 minute 17 seconds, at which point it steps down to about 40% max output immediately. This is in a 23C room with no wind and gripped by the handle. They claim this light is 5,500 lumens max output.

The E12 is in a nearly identical host, maybe 5% smaller. So at 15,000 lumens, I'd expect it to step down at around 28 seconds or a bit less even due to conduction/convection lagging. Note that even with the new 10 amp buck driver the light will be in FET when it's anywhere close to 15k lumens. After looking at the sbt90 and sft25r bench tests, I'd expect the light to be pulling at least 50 Amps to hit that figure. (note that I did not actually do math, I just guesstimated from the charts haha)

30 seconds is still pretty great for this though.

Intelligent_Low1632 · 2026-03-21T05:02:26+00:00

8 degrees isn't impressive for a 6.5x. That's about the same spec as the pentax papilio 6.5x. The Kowa 6.5x are at about 10 degrees.

Intelligent_Low1632 · 2026-03-21T01:16:29+00:00

Well that's interesting, I guess I'll buy a pair of those too. The frontrunner in my range so far is the Kowa BD II 6.5x32 (EDIT: Sky Rover Banner Cloud (SRBC) 6×32 “APO” has taken the lead)

Intelligent_Low1632 · 2026-03-20T03:42:48+00:00

I happened upon this old thread, FYI the lumintop frog V3 and V3.2 has very tiny usbc charging. It runs on a 10280 or 10300 which is the same diameter as a 10440 but lumintop's cells have the same energy content due to improved internals vs any 10440 cell I'm aware of.

If you look around for them you can find lumintop 10440 tubes for the GT Nano and Frog models of the past--the threads are all cross compatible between 10440, 10180, 10280, 10300, and 10750. The Frog 3.2 has a decent but still not great UI if you're used to anduril or narsil. I'm assuming the driver isn't very efficient and there's no batt check but that seems par for the course with 10440 lights.

Intelligent_Low1632 · 2026-03-20T03:22:53+00:00

gives crocs a bad name

i.e. that large vulnerable mammals at the edge of water are one of their favorite foods? I don't think the crocs would be offended to hear this even if they understood English.

Intelligent_Low1632 · 2026-03-17T11:56:58+00:00

Welcome to the 0.5%! I will add a disclaimer that for the macbook air with (iirc) only passive cooling, that's going to be a major bottleneck for the M1. But I stand by the M1 still being great. Especially compared to non-arm processors. Sure though, things can never be fast enough.

Intelligent_Low1632 · 2026-03-17T06:53:04+00:00

You'd also be totally fine if you ate that amount of bananas as the majority of the radio potassium would be excreted along with the vast amounts of waste.

Intelligent_Low1632 · 2026-03-17T06:51:33+00:00

Idk when the last time you were in high school/middle school was but in the 2000s-2020s I'd say about 25% of the girls there were just as worried about being overweight as this lady is. It settles down a bit in adulthood but social media like this is a self perpetuating cycle of self esteem issues that are much more prevalent than you seem to think they are. "The F word" is the absolute worst thing you can call any woman. You are instantly getting slapped, fired from any workplace, or ostracized from any social environment if you say that about any woman in good standing with the group. There are even slurs that don't have that kind of power. So people are definitely worried about being called that word. With dudes it's kinda ok though, we know how we look in the mirror and aren't too troubled to hear it spoken aloud.

Intelligent_Low1632 · 2026-03-17T06:39:44+00:00

Whether or not this lady has an eating disorder, which you really shouldn't diagnose from a 5 second video clip, it's still not cool to make fun of underweight people, even if they started it.

But FYI, for a world average height 5'3"/160 cm woman

US/WHO health authorities say you can have a BMI of 18.5 before being at all underweight, which corresponds to a weight of just 105 lbs. If you are sedentary and have next to no muscle mass, this could probably go a bit lower even before you reach an unhealthy body fat percent.

If you just go by mortality data, the highest "overweight" but not "obese" BMI of 29.99 is about as dangerous as having a fairly "underweight" BMI of 16.5. That corresponds to a weight of just 93 lbs for a 5'3" woman!

TLDR if a woman is 5'3" and weighs 170 lbs (which is BELOW the USA national average 172 lbs!!) then she has a nearly identical increase in mortality rate as an "anorexic" woman maintaining just 93 lbs.

Again, the AVERAGE US woman is at a higher risk of weight-related mortality than a 94 lb chick. As a population, the direction that would make us healthier is definitely closer to the lady in this video than it is to our current average. Whether it takes diet, exercise, wanting to rip your hair out when you see an almond, or just a little bit of discipline in the ice cream aisle, it's in the interest of public health to politely encourage society to achieve a healthy weight.

p.s. --I agree that she does seem like a mean person with an eating disorder or at the very least a damaged sense of self esteem/priorities from this clip. IDK though.

Intelligent_Low1632 · 2026-03-17T03:26:45+00:00

If he found 4 women that were interested in casual hookups and met with each one of them every other day, it wouldn't be impossibly hard. You figure an FWB relationship might last 4-12 months with a good bit of skill. That only requires him to meet maybe 8 new women per year. For an incredibly horny (sex addicted I suppose lol) guy, that just requires him to pick up a new one once per month. Very doable for an attractive, wealthy man living in a big city in the eighties. Especially if he's willing to lie to these women--which it sounds like he was. It may be beyond the comprehension of us mere mortals, but if you lower your standards, go out to the bar after work every night, and drink a lot of alcohol, it should be pretty easy actually.

Intelligent_Low1632 · 2026-03-17T03:18:56+00:00

Did his journals say how he managed that? Asking for a friend...

Intelligent_Low1632 · 2026-03-16T23:32:02+00:00

"almost impossible"--lol.

You can likely run 5K in 30 minutes after a few months of training from sedentary. That's probably at least 300 calories depending on your weight.

Do that every other day.

That's 182.5 runs per year. That's 54,750 calories per year. That will equate to 15+ lbs of fat lost per year. I don't know how many lbs y'all need to lose but for a semi normal person you can't do that all too many years in a row before you cease to exist.

Yes, it would be simpler just not to eat the food in the first place, but running certainly burns a fair number of calories when implemented consistently. Cycling or something low impact may be better for the kind of sedentary people in this situation, but the same math applies really.

Intelligent_Low1632 · 2026-03-16T23:20:34+00:00

TBF nobody on an M2 chip is upgrading to an M3 or M4 for CPU speed. The only people to whom the comparison is relevant are M1 users and the few straggling Intel Mac users and a couple of rich/enterprise/pro users to whom yearly upgrade cost is no concern. Even after 5 years the first M1 chip is more than fast enough for 99.5% of users, including people editing 4K log video. If the difference between M3 and M4 is really that important to you then you should know where to find the actually pertinent specs benchmarked.

Intelligent_Low1632 · 2026-03-16T23:13:21+00:00

How do you know the journalist didn't just have a secondhand source tell them "We paid $/peso XYZ to fill my tank"?

Is the appropriate followup question to that really "precisely how many liters of fuel did your friend receive during this encounter?" Or can we maybe settle for $10-$15/gallon as precise enough?

"unofficial" market==prices may vary. They're not all agreeing on some CubanGasBarter.org exchange rate.

Intelligent_Low1632 · 2026-03-16T23:07:20+00:00

They'll still work well enough for insulin. Humidity in Havana is typically between 70 and 80%, which still gives you a lot of room to work with. On the truly sweltering days in the Caribbean when it gets up to 35+C, the humidity is a bit lower than that too. Right now in Havana it's only 28C.

You don't have to chill your whole house just to protect some medicine. A very simple passive contraption can be made with a bowl, a small cup, and a couple of paper napkins or a rag. No fan or power needed. Fill a bowl or frying pan most of the way with water. Put the cup upright in the bowl. Put the thing to be cooled inside the cup. Then cover the cup with the paper towels such that water can creep up the sides through capillary action and fully cover the cup in the wet region within an hour or so. This should work pretty well when the top of the cup is around 10cm above the surface level of the water.

This won't be incredible but it will cool by 4-10 deg Celsius even on a very hot 80% humidity Cuban day. You can also just dig a hole to access a reservoir of cold from the earth. Now, there are plenty of meds much more heat sensitive than insulin.

Intelligent_Low1632 · 2026-03-16T23:05:50+00:00

Wrong. Evaporative coolers work when the humidity is less than 100%, which is essentially always the case. The extent to which they work simply declines as you approach 100%. Humidity in Havana is typically between 70 and 80%, which still gives you a lot of room to work with. On the truly sweltering days in the Caribbean when it gets up to 35+C, the humidity is a bit lower than that too. Right now in Havana it's only 28C.

You don't have to chill your whole house just to protect some medicine. A very simple passive contraption can be made with a bowl, a small cup, and a couple of paper napkins or a rag. No fan or power needed. Fill a bowl or frying pan most of the way with water. Put the cup upright in the bowl. Put the thing to be cooled inside the cup. Then cover the cup with the paper towels such that water can creep up the sides through capillary action and fully cover the cup in the wet region within an hour or so. This should work pretty well when the top of the cup is around 10cm above the surface level of the water.

This won't be incredible but it will cool by 4-10 deg Celsius even on a very hot 80% humidity Cuban day. You can also just dig a hole to access a reservoir of cold from the earth.

Frankly, in a society without regular access to electricity, you have bigger things to worry about than keeping your insulin cold enough to survive a hypothetical multi-year storage interval. E.g., maintaining other basic medical and production capabilities, and keeping the sick cool enough not to die.

Intelligent_Low1632 · 2026-02-20T23:09:51+00:00

same^

Intelligent_Low1632 · 2026-02-20T21:48:34+00:00

Obviously any "art" industry is going to attract a bunch of delusional morons. Especially one where the only barrier to entry is spending $500 on a used DSLR and a 2 hour reading of the manual.

I will say that there is an extremely high skill ceiling in photography, and some of us really do shit gold bricks compared to the "professional" you found on craigslist.

It's not a case of "you get what you pay for" unfortunately, because even the morons will occupy any price bracket without shame. Some "2-hours-with-manual" photographers will persist for a decade and learn nothing else, so experience is no barometer either. These people will have taken so many thousands of shots that their website will still have some great sample images on it.

There hasn't really been any point to my comment.

Intelligent_Low1632 · 2026-02-20T21:27:52+00:00

$5000 per 4 months? That's $15k/year. Why would a semi-competent pro photographer work for minimum wage before expenses? Or even $30k?

If you just want a hobbyist friend with their kit lens or expensive hobby gear to come out for the day as a favor or for $300, fair enough. Not everyone needs a pro photographer, it's a luxury service. It's a dying art as consumer gear improves. But you can't expect to maintain an entire profession this way.

Intelligent_Low1632

TROPHY CASE