Opticron Imagic 10x50 binoculars review

Opticron’s Imagic 10x50 binoculars are coated in black rubber, which gives a good grip, and come with a soft case.

The two plastic front caps fitted well, but there was just one rear eyecap and to make it stay on you had to open up the binoculars – individual eyecaps would have been easier.

A nice feature of the eyepieces was the twist-up eyecups and there was good interpupillary adjustment, while the central focuser was smooth to use.

The dioptre adjustment on the right-hand eyepiece had a click-stop wheel, which was a little stiff but would loosen up with prolonged use.

The optical surfaces are fully multicoated but there was slight ghosting evident when we turned to the brightest.

We used the bright star Altair to check the quality of the 5.3° field of view, and it was crisp over the central 60 per cent with slight distortion out to 75 per cent before trailing off towards the field edges – good overall.

Jupiter’s four major moons were easily spotted and we also picked up Uranus and Neptune, the latter looking like a fainter blue ‘star’.

Our resolution test used the double star Albireo, which we could just split into the blue and gold components, while the much wider pair of Nu Draconis was clearly seen.

Next, we viewed several summer nebulae. M16, M17 the Orion Nebula and M8 the Lagoon Nebula were reasonably bright, while the globular cluster M13 was a lovely blob.

Our test galaxies of M51 and M101 could be found with little trouble, so for its price this is a reasonable pair of binoculars that can give some good results.

This review appeared in the October 2010 issue of Sky at Night Magazine