Yes. I finally got to really spend some time with them hunting hard for about a week. I like them even better now. Like the other model, these were my most used hunting tool--they just worked better. At ranges where the other ones were getting marginal these could pick out deer much faster and more easily and I was more confident in the answers without having to range something quite so many times. It ranged every deer I tried to range, the farthest being 1400+ (just the farthest I happened to see any).
I even found time one morning to shoot some more pics. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif
This was around 10 a.m., overcast day.
A house,
Hill next to the house,
When I had the camera and was all ready, alas, there was no deer to be found at long range anywhere. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/mad.gif Cows were much easier to find. On these I didn't do the best job of keeping the square over what I ranged perfectly when snapping the pic, but you should get the idea. A pair of close cow/far cow shots:
And the next:
Last but not least, a new building has gone up recently (or at least the first time I noticed it). A big white building! So I was finally able to see what these things could do on a good target in good conditions. It didn't disappoint:
It's the white dot above the hood of my TB:
So, it officially beat its advertised range (that's 3.074 KM) when given something good to shoot at. I kept ranging it and backing up and was actually right at the edge of a coulee so it might have gotten it a couple yards farther, but I doubt it could have made it on the other side (which was my neighbor's land anyway). Oh well, close enough. The first time I saw the 3K+ reading was pretty cool.
The sun only shown a small amount of time while I was there and didn't get any pics, but my general feeling was you can knock off around 500 yds +/- some depending upon the object when in bright sunlight. For example, I was able to get the white building only to about 2830 in bright direct sunlight and none of the 2500+ hillsides. On stuff like that max range seemed to hover right around 2K +/- a bit with the sun right on it.
Other things I noticed:
Battery life was obviously shorter than the 1500 m model but one battery lasted me about 6 hard days hunting and much playing with them ranging about a million things. It didn't die until I was done hunting and the temp dropped down near zero. I was pretty happy with that and only see it as any sort of issue if you're packed into the mountains for extended periods of time. I picked up another rechargable battery, so with that and the one it comes with along with the charger that will charge them both at the same time, it's not a problem if you're anywhere near civilization. For a 1 week mountain hunt I'd pack two spares with a fresh one in it. The one in it would likely last the whole hunt, one spare should easily handle it. That'd leave an extra spare just in case.
In all, I'm very happy I made the purchase. As a pure rangefinder it probably isn't any better value than the Swaro, especially since the extended range is much farther than most of us will ever need. I think the Geovid, Vector 1500, etc are probably better benchmarks to compare it to for those who need/want binocs.
Compared to those, this is an unbelievable bang for the buck I believe. But, most don't really need this much rangefinder either.
Hope that helps with your choice.
