Customer reviews
Excellent apochromatic refractor
Review by db2005 on 13.01.2018 17:26:38( 5 / 5 )
Excellent apochromatic refractor made to extremely high optical standard! I made side-by-side comparison with a Synta 80 ED apo refractor and found the SD81S to be visibly better in terms of sharpness, contrast and with significantly less chromatic aberration. Mechanical build quality is in a completely different league too.
Mechanical quality is simply excellent, and paint finish is flawless. The single-speed rack-and-pinion focuser is extremely good, and the focuser lock down mechanism works well. The SD81S feels minimalistic, light weight for its size but feels much better than typical Chinese refractors.
There are only two minor gripes (which do not detract from the 5-star rating):
- The flip mirror diagonal is ... not very good. I replaced it with a high quality dielectric for a visible improvement in performance. I wish Vixen stopped supplying their premium scopes with diagonals at all, as they will probably be discarded anyway. Needless waste of resources.
- The red-dot finder feels slightly cheaply made and is functionally very simple compared to other alternatives. On the other hand, the adjustment knubs can be operated by fingers alone (i.e. without nightmare-fumbling-in-the-dark hex keys).
It is expensive, but in terms of optical performance it is visibly a step up from generic 80ED doublets.
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