The Long Awaited Leica APO Televid 82

Benchmark Resolution with a Superior Field of View

By Pete Dunne, CMBO Director

I first caught rumors of Leica’s new super-performing spotting scope, successor to their celebrated 77mm Televid, about four years ago.

Hints, nods, non-committal silence in response to questions directed toward Leica insiders.  Product inventory drying up.  Crumbs of knowledge dropped–keeping us guessing, keeping us wanting...    

Keeping potential spotting scope buyers on the fence.  Afraid to purchase another top performing scope until the new German Uberglass was out.    

Who wants to buy the best only to discover it’s not?    

The 82mm was projected to be out three years ago.  It wasn’t.      

“Want to get it right the first time,” went the spin.    

“Problems with the eyepiece design,” I heard (“and you didn’t hear that from me, right?”).    

I guess it’s reassuring to know that even German engineers are; after all, only mortal and that the laws of physics apply to them, too.  When you set out to build a high performance wide angle zoom eyepiece that still offers benchmark resolution you are pushing both the functional and theoretical limits of optics.    

Somewhere out there on the optical horizon-line (which falls across Solms, Germany) Socrates and Aristotle were in a duel to the death (and a bunch of German engineers were holding their collective breaths).    

So were we.  Until now.

First Crack

I saw the 82mm’s hand built prototype back in July while on a Leica sponsored trip to Brazil.  Design-wise it differed little from its predecessor (except for the more robust eyepiece and reinforced bridge on the dual focus wheel system).  At first glance, the biggest difference was the color.  Black, not silver.  But sooner or later you came back to marveling at the eyepiece.

It was bigger and heftier than the eyepiece on its predecessor and most competitors.  But the biggest difference was etched on the focus ring.  Unlike Kowa, Swarovski, Zeiss and the Leica 82mm’s 77mm predecessor, whose zoom eyepieces offered magnifications ranging from 20x to 60x, the range of focus on the new Leica was truncated on both ends.   It started at 25x and stopped out at 50x.

So Leica was selling buyers short? 

You could argue that (and competitors probably will).  But there is another way to regard the tighter range.  Fact is there isn’t a whole heck of a lot of difference between 20x and 25x.  And even on high-end instruments image quality begins to degrade just over 50x.  You can crank it higher but the benefits, measured in terms of being able to perceive greater detail, is marginal.

It could, and probably should, be argued that Leica’s decision to top the magnification out at 50x was performance rather than marketing driven and it is certainly an engineering concession to the wide angle ambition of the designers.

It’s only physics, boys and girls.  You push the limits here; something falls off the optics bench over there.

How did the prototype perform?  Pretty good.  Hard to say without any other instrument to compare it to.  The question was never performance.  It was, after all, a Leica.  The question was did the scope offer performance commensurate with the price.

The new Leica was going to hit the market at close to $4,000.  Even with the zoom eyepiece included (the only eyepiece available), the 82mm Leica was still going to be about $1,000 more expensive than its closest high-end rival.

Yes, were talking “street value” here.  The CMBO member discounted price for the Leica APO Televid 82mm with eyepiece is $3,995.  That’s MAP. 

And while performance minded buyers are willing to cough up an extra grand for superior performance, there-in lies the make or break.

Does the Leica truly out-perform the competition?

That’s a question that couldn’t be answered until the production model was out and direct comparisons could be made.

If I’m not mistaken, it’s the question you have right now.

Stuff You’ll Want to Know

The first thing you will want to know about the new Leica is that it is heavy–among all the big objective top performers, it is the new heavy weight champ.  At four lbs., four oz., it is about three ounces heavier than its closest rival, the Kowa 883 (and about eight ounces heavier than the Swarovski HD 80 and Zeiss Diascope 85).

Now, sometime, somewhere, some sales person is going to tell you that the Leica body is, in fact, nearly a full ounce lighter than the Kowa body. 

Yes it is!  But scope bodies don’t work without eyepieces and when you plug the eyepieces in the Leica tips the scale.

OK.  That’s the bad news.  The good news is that you can mate the 82mm with a super light Gitzo GT2531 tripod fitted with a Bogen 700 RC2 head and the whole thing weighs in at a manageable 7 lbs. 9 oz.

Of course you are going to pay about $705 for the tripod and head.  But anybody who is going to pay $4,000 for a spotting scope isn’t going to quibble about the price of a mere tripod.

Why is the scope so heavy?   In part because it’s a Leica and Leica builds its stuff to shrug off a level of abuse that would put many other scopes in the shop.  And don’t forget that wide-angle eyepiece.  Pushing physics has a cost whether it is measured in grams or Euros.

The weight of the eyepiece alone is almost one pound.  The price is $1,050.

OK.  It’s heavy.  But if it out performs the competition...

The eyepiece locks in place.  If you are still grumbling about the old first-generation 77mm Leica Televid whose zoom eyepieces had a habit of falling out, exorcize that memory and be at peace.  The magnification adjustment ring is slick, smooth and responsive.  Going the full range of focus in slightly more than a 1/4 twist–smoother than the Kowa and Swarovski; not quite as smooth as the Zeiss Diascope.

The mount is designed to shoe into the popular Manfrotto 128RC (was 3130) head just like Swarovski (eliminating the need for the screw-in base plate that always seems to need tightening).  As a bonus, the scope shoe will also fit into the 700RC2 head, sans screw-in base plate.  Eyepiece affixed, the scope is slightly rear heavy but not disconcertingly so.

The mounting ring allows the scope and eyepiece to swivel (allowing shorter viewers a side-on view without having to lower the tripod).  The twisting, eyepiece eyecup has two click intermediate stops between flush and extended allowing eyeglass wearers to customize their eye relief needs.

The scope focuses down to an astonishing 8 ft. (Kowa can barely manage 16 ft.) allowing supernatural views of objects close at hand.

So what?  Well don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.

At 25x and 8 ft., the Leica gives viewers about 4 inches of in-your-face intimacy.  You can watch butterflies nectaring with near microscopic clarity.  You can not only see individual feather parts, you can see feather lice!

It takes four revolutions of the slower or “coarse” focus knob to go the range of focus (twice as many turns as the Kowa).  But insofar as the focus is less stiff than the Kowa’s it is, functionally, only slightly slower overall.

In fact, in a time trial between the Kowa, the Swarovski, and the Leica they all timed in at about 3-4 seconds to go the range of focus.   The fine focus wheel is useful for fine adjustment at close range and to follow birds feeding through a flock.

All in all it’s a handsome, rugged, intelligently designed and quality impregnated instrument.

But does it out-perform the competition?

How do you say mmmmmmmmmm...yeah in German?

Optics have come a long way since Galileo chucked glass down a tube and the fact is, high quality optics have reached a level of perfection that is beyond the human eye to perceive.  Birders will always judge optics in general and scopes in particular by how well they resolve detail, transmit color, and perform in low light conditions and for many these qualities, of and by themselves, define “performance.”

So I put the Leica 82mm up against the Kowa 883 in a darkened room and trained them on an eye chart with letters reduced to Lilliputian levels.

The result.  It was a dead heat between the Kowa and the Leica.  Then for grins I brought in the Zeiss Diascope 85mm and...It might be that the Zeiss was just the ever so slightest bit better in terms of resolution.

Surprised?  You needn’t be. The Zeiss has been underestimated for years.

The fact is all three scopes were within quibbling distance of each other; all of them toeing the line that defines today’s optical benchmark.  I’m willing to bet that there is as much difference in optical performance between instruments within the optical lines as between the lines.

Now here’s the thing.  The real optical rub.  The Leica attained optical parity with two of the top performing instruments (including the one that has come to be regarded as the benchmark device, the Kowa 883) but did so with a wide angle lens that not only offers a bigger chunk of the world (making it easier to find your target and work comparatively through flocks) but accomplishes this with a field that is wonderfully sharp and distortion free edge to edge.

In direct comparison the Leica’s field of view was 125 ft./1000 yds. at its lowest magnification setting as compared to 115 ft./1000 yds. for the Kowa.   That’s a difference of 9%.

Doesn’t sound like much for another grand?  Maybe not.  But remember, the lowest setting on the Leica zoom is 25x.  The Kowa was 20x.  The Leica, at 25x, has nearly a 10% wider field of view than the Kowa at 20x.

If the Kowa is cranked up to 25x, the difference is even more pronounced.  At 98 ft./1000 yds. the Kowa’s field is 27% smaller than the Leica.

And that, if you are panning through flocks and trying to find birds quickly, is a considerable difference.

So if you have been reading through this entire review waiting to hear whether the new Leica 82mm Televid is the best performing spotting scope on the market here’s what you have been waiting for.  My opinion.

The new Leica 82mm does indeed mate benchmark optical performance with wide-angle ease.  As many people know, I have never been a big fan of zoom lenses precisely because I find the narrow field of view (that has been the inherent shortfall of the zooms) too great a sacrifice.  I have always preferred to do my scanning with a fixed 30x or 32x then switch to a zoom in situations where I need higher magnification or, more commonly, when I wanted a reduced field of view to reduce glare on back-lit subjects.

The new Leica is win/win.  It gives birders the resolution they crave and the utilitarian ease birders want. 

It is, in short, very arguably the best performing birding scope on the market today.

If you want to pay the price.  If you want to bear the weight.

Comes with a warranty commensurate with the performance and the price.  What does this mean?

It means if something breaks Kummern Sie nicht darum.

NOTE: The Leica APO Televid 82 is not yet available on-line.  To order and inquire about inventory you must call the Center for Research & Education at 609.861.0700 or stop by the Center (click here for directions to CRE).