Unsupported Speculation

I was amused this morning playing around with a cheap monocular I bought off of Amazon. It was only $15, and can be zoomed with a little twist ring, but it purports to have a magnification of 300 times! Holy crap!

There is even a little video on its page on Amazon that shows someone supposedly using the monocular in what looks to be a major city in China, and begin z-ooo-ooo-ooo-ming in, and it is almost like perpetually zooming in on a computer generated fractal, and whenever you think you couldn’t possible look any closer, you do, and then closer still.

Eventually in the video, the user reaches the end of this incredible offer’s magnification ability, and he is looking at a taxi driver next to his cab, clear across the city! Wow!

Reality was a little underwhelming.

It’s not a bad piece of optics. It does have zoom, just not 300x. It was only $15, and so there is no lens coating, and it’s not filled with nitrogen to keep it from building up humidity on the inside.

I compared its maximum zoom to a more expensive telescope I have, which more honestly states it has 25 times magnification, and the zoom looked just about the same between the two.

There are funny numbers games that go on in the cheap optics world. Say you have a monocular that states it is a 10×30. When optics manufacturers don’t employ marketing tricks, then this would mean that the monocular magnifies 10 times, and that it has a front lens that is 30 millimeters across.

10x magnification is easy to understand, but a 30mm front lens gives you an indication of how much light the monocular lets in, allowing the image you see to be brighter or darker depending on the width of the front lens. It also influences how wide the field of view is in the image, and when it is wider, it is easier to find what you are looking for in the image, because you aren’t trying to find a bird through a drinking straw.

But now for the numbers games.

Say this is a cheap monocular, which means you are competing with all the other cheap monocular manufacturers. Because of the cut-throat, realpolitik, dog-eat-dog world of cheap optical gear, all that it takes for one manufacturer to seize the competitive edge and literally become the sole seller of cheap optics, is to entice prospective buyers with the suggestion of incredible magnification ability at a price that can’t be beat.

They can do this a number of ways. ONE way is to flip the numbers of the magnification and the front lens width, and so now you offer a monocular that is 30×10. 30 times magnification! Take my money!

But you can go a step further. What if you just absentmindedly add a zero somewhere. Then you can offer a 30×100 optic. People not prepared for what they are reading will think, “FAR OUT! It is normal vision TIMES ONE-HUNDRED!”

But you can go one step further still. What if you keep the magnification and front lens width numbers where they are supposed to be, but mistakenly add a zero to the front lens width. At last, you can offer a monocular that is 10×300.

“Three-hundred ti…” The prospective buyer then fainted and collapsed to the floor, and to the horror of his wife, began twitching while he lay there unconscious.

You reign (temporarily) as The King of Cheap Optics (ceremonial trumpets), and if legal action results, you can blame the poor quality control of your outsourced sweatshop in Shanghai for adding that unfortunate zero.