I used to head up to the farm shed with my dad sometimes, and on a good day I’d be allowed into grandad’s office! He had all the exciting things an old farm had, massive single channel walkie talkies and these, to me, at the ripe old age of maybe 7, HUGE binoculars! I was allowed to use to to search for the crows in the tall pine tree out the front of his house, I could never find the crows, not because they werem’t there, but because my 7 year old arms couldn’t hold the big old binos still!
Skip forward a mere forty-three years and, with modern binoculars in the 10x range, I still have the same problem – look at the moon? shaky! look at a bird on a telephone pole half a field away, shaky… Personally I blame the caffeine! But the reality is that holding a set of 10x binoculars dead still is quite the task! Now I’ve not looked at buying a new pair of binoculars in many years and the old 10×50 get dragged out every now and then, and there are a couple of reasons for that… As I’ve already mentioned, holding them steady and, now that my sight isn’t what it once was, the adjustability of the eye-cups is limited.
Our illustrious editor popped me a note to let me know that the very recently (early 2025) released Fujinon Techno Stabi 16×40 were headed my way, I was very keen to get my hands on them to see just how good this stabilisation was! I’ve been a photographer, both professionally and now just for the family, for many years and I really can appreciate the benefits of a stabilised lens or camera body, but for a 16x binocular, to say I was a little dubious was fair I suppose.
The binoculars arrived and to my delight were quite svelte for a 16×40 Bino, I’m used to the old guard, if you will, where they’re basically massive black tubes and you need a regular bicep curl routine to lift and keep them steady, these weigh in at about 850gm and are easy to wrangle in one hand, and it’s also very easy to control your focus with one hand, the large focus dial toward the front of the pair locates perfectly under your fingers.
Dialling in the pair is very simple, most people use the one eye, two eyes method – as do I! – I set the Fujinon Techno Stabi 16×40 focus up using my left eye (I’m left handed, too!) then the Interpupillary Distance and tweaking the diopter (That’s the bit that means you’re seeing one image rather than two! always used to drive me nuts as a kid) – All of the controls for these functions are easy to navigate, as is the eyecup adjustment – eyepieces can twist in or out to suit those of us that wear glasses. At this point I took a look out my window, I’m a couple of kilometers out of the city (Melbourne) and can see the city towers from where I stand – gazing across at the buildings I thought, yes, these are 16x binos, I can tell by the shaky image! (oh my hands!) then I flicked on the image stabilisation and whoa! I’ve honestly never had such an experience with a pair of binoculars! A detailed, stable image! The stunning ED glass in the lenses (extra-low dispersion glass) cuts some of the chromatic aberration you can get viewing at a distance with light falloff on edges etc.
The stabilisation was very evident, there’s a video demo that will show you what I mean as I don’t have the crazy camera rig to make my own video, (it’s over on the Fujifilm website here) but in a nutshell, when you have binoculars that are capable of a 16x (these also come in 20x) magnification, it can be very hard to hand-hold and still be able to see detail of the subject you’re looking at, birds, planes, the moon (as is Michael’s demonstration in the linked video) With the Fujinon Techno Stabi 16×40 you get plus/minus 3 degree of correction. Basically the prism in the gimbal section reacts in the opposite motion to what your shaky hands are doing and smooths the vision right out!
The beautiful finish of the Fujinon Techno Stabi 16×40 feel great in the hand, they come with a neck strap and a hand strap if that’s your thing, they have eye-cap protectors, and I’d really like lens protectors, I had thought some sort of cap might be included, but maybe it was missing from my demo kit?
The binoculars are great for outdoors, with an IPX7 rating you can leave them underwater for half hour at up to 1 meter deep without it becoming too much of an issue (remember to come up for air and mind the sharks!) and the 2 AAA batteries that you can change yourself via the little hatch on the side of the unit will give you enough stabilisation power for about 30 hours.
The stunning image quality and perfect in-hand feel and functionality really wins for me so far as any binoculars I’ve ever used, and I’m very sad to have to return these beauties! Places like CameraPro sell these currently (at time of print they have a sale on) for around $1600, so they’re not what you might call cheap, but for the quality – you’re getting what you’ll pay for here.
DRN would to thank Fujinon for making the review unit available.
