Rating:

However, don’t think you’re getting high-quality construction for that money. These literally disintegrated on me on a recent international trip where they were subjected to neglible abuse (they were mostly carried around in a small backpack on long hikes and sometimes tightly packed in my suitcase). The shaft that couples the two eyepieces to the focusing mechanism is held together with flimsy plastic on both ends, and one of the ends simply snapped off, leaving me with an unusable set of binoculars.

The warranty on these is laughable (you have to pay to ship these – at a cost that’s well over half the cost of buying a new pair – to Bushnell where they determine whether it’s a manufacturer defect and, if so, send you a repaired item in a few weeks), so my options were to buy a new pair or to try to repair these on my own. I opted for the latter.

In so doing, I took a look inside. It looks like Bushnell cut every corner possible when throwing these together. Most metal edges have been poorly milled, resulting in uneven surfaces. A white adhesive substance has unevenly and sloppily been applied inside to hold the optics assembly together. Not encouraging.

That said, I’d buy these again. Even if I burn through one of these every year due to the shoddy construction, I’d have to go a decade of doing so before I’d have spent enough to equal the cost of a well constructed pair of binoculars that gave me 10×50 magnification.