I recently went on a birding trip to Scotland with my camera and a long lens, but this was not sufficient to see most birds. On the trip, I tried many different binoculars, and discovered that I absolutely needed to have image stabilization. Without it, my shakey hands make the image bounce about. The image-stabilized Canon binoculars that I tried worked well, but were heavy. The all-weather image-stabilized Canons all cost almost $2000 and are quite heavy (2–3 pounds). In addition, I am a photography nut and want to take pictures of what I see in my binoculars. The photography alternative is buying an expensive and even heavier telescope and tripod and placing a camera up to the eyepiece.

I had seen that Sony had introduced two electronic binoculars, which work like two Micro 4/3 cameras placed side-by-side. The image hits a sensitive photo detector, and is viewed electronically. This obviates the need to get large-diameter (expensive and heavy) glass lenses. Even in extremely low light, my OM-D camera provides bright (albeit noisy) images in the viewfinder. I discovered that Sony was coming out with a second generation digital recording binocular, the DEV-50V/B, with greatly improved specifications and reduced weight (1 pound 10 oz) and size. As you can see, it is dust proof and water resistant, autofucusing, and close focusing, and in addition can zoom over a wide range.

I asked some knowledgable friends, and they brought up two issue of concern:

1. Can the focusing distinguish a bird from the tree or bush?  Can if focus manually?
2. is the resolution of the view-finder (1024x768 OLED) high enough?

After some soul-searching, I ordered the DEV-50V/B from Amazon, and it is coming today.

They arrived, and I took a video of the unpacking.

Alas, The binoculars seem to be misaligned. When I get to Step 6, "adjusting the relative vertical position of the right and left viewfinder, the horizontal line is tilted with respect to the vertical lines. The manual says this is an indication of something wrong.

Nonetheless, I decided to try out the DEV-50V/B as soon as a hailstorm moved out of the neighborhood. When the light is good, and the zoom is not too great, it takes acceptable pictures:

The original image was 6016 x 3384 pixels. But there is something seriously wrong with the JPEG engine in the DEV-50V/B. It you blow up this 20 megapixel image, all you get is JPEG artifacts:

In addition, when the digital zoom is engaged (the bird image is zoomed in all the way), the picture exhibits extreme JPEG artifacts, which are even visible in the viewfinders. This bird was at the very top of a tree behind my across-the-street neighbor's house:

Original

This is still a 20 Mp image, but it is clearly unusable for any reproduction purposes. Unfortunately, there is no ability to capture RAW images on the DEV-50V/B—you are stuck with awful JPEGs. My pictures were nicely tagged with my GPS location.

The next pair of images was taken of my Blue Heron decoy (to keep my Koi safe) from the same location, but at different magnifications:

Again, the highly-zoomed image quality is unacceptable. It may have been misfocused, but it did not look that way in the viewfinder.

One final image is again of a bird in the top of a tree; this also shows unacceptable JPEG artifacts:

Original

The birds were mostly scared away by the storm, and it was getting dark, so that is all for today.

Here are some more pictures I took in the morning:

Original

Original

Let me summarize my feelings about the DEV-50V/B:

Good points

• They are lighter than most image-stabilized, weatherproof binoculars.
• After a little training time, the controls match nicely to your fingers—middle finger on the zoom control, forefinger on the shutter.
• The GPS worked well, even indoors.
• They have advantages as binoculars:
  • The zoom feature is really nice since yoiu can locate a bird in wide view, and then zoom in on it.
  • The image you see is good so long as the zoom level does not employ the digital zoom feature (past the center bar on the zoom scale). Above this, you se an increasing blocky image without more detail.
  • The large (included) rubber eye pieces made it easy for me to use them with my galsses on.

Bad points

• It is an awful camera.
  • The JPEG engine is truly awful. I did not feel that you could print any pictures from the binoculars. What is the point of the 20 Mp resolution if the image is processed to mush?
  • No RAW capability
  • The image stabilization was nowhere near as good as the one in my Olympus OM-D. Now that Sony and Olympus are interrelated, hopefully Sony will incorporate the 5-axis Olympus engine into the next generation of these binoculars. At 25x magnification, you need super stabilization, even with non-shakey hands.
  • My pair seemed to be misaligned, and the 3D adjustment (which uses a rapidly bouncing vertical bar) barely got above the proper adjustment point, and did so too fast for me to click.
• They are just not very good binoculars, especially for birding.
  • The resolution you see is subpar. Looking at flower heads acrooss the street did not resolve their white centers. These were easily observed on "real" binoculars.
  • There is a fundamental conflict between photography and binoculars. With "real" binoculars, the brightness of the scene is identical to what you see without the binoculars. With the DEV-50V/B, what you see is for a properly exposed photograph, and is much dimmer than the real scene, even with the brightness of the eyepieces set at their maximum. The photo would be overexposed at the scene's brightness level, but bird markings need all the light you can get to see the colors and details.
• The multipurpose button (used to navigate the menus) which tilts and pushes was really difficult to use. Going through the menus was painful. I had a great deal of difficulty setting the time zone. Pushing down to select resulted in a tilt, which changed the selection.
• Sony supplies a power brick to plug into the binoculars in order to charge the battery. That takes 3 hours, so any purchaser will have to buy an extarnal charger and several more batteries since the battery charge lasts just a few hours.
• Sony's level 2 support was clueless about this model, and totally unhelpful. They could not even cut a repair order because the model number is not in their system. They could not tell me what the tilted lines in Step 6 indicated. Their response was to return it to Amazon, which I am doing.

I hope that someone at Sony reads this and can comment on whether this "pre-release" DEV-50V/B was working the way it should. Until they do, I will not purchase a replacement pair. For $2000 they should work a lot better than this.

I just (December 2014) purchased a pair of Fujinon 14x40 Techno-Stabi binoculars for $1000. They lack zoom and photo taking, but they offer superb stabilized images.