It smoothly and accurately adjusts across a wide range of focal depths. One of the best features of the Athlon Midas ED was the ease and precision of adjusting the focus. These field-of-view differences proved more noticeable when I was trying to differentiate spot-breasted wrens from rufous-and-white wrens as they crawled through vine tangles in southern Mexico, for example the Nikon pair’s narrower field, which had otherwise excellent glass, seemed to require more time to find the birds than the Athlon Midas ED did (and tellingly, by the end of the trip, I was grabbing the Athlon pair each morning). The Carson 3D binoculars were impressively sharp and easily as bright as the Athlon set, but they felt almost as if they had tunnel vision, likely because their field of view was around 20 percent narrower than that of the Athlons. The Nikon was 361 feet at 1,000 yards versus 426 feet for the Athlons, Bushnells, and Celestrons, which had the widest fields of view of the models I tested.

Neither the Nikon nor the Carson model had the wide field of view at distance that the Athlon Midas ED boasted. During testing in Southern California and southern Mexico, a few other models-including the Bushnell Legend L Series, Celestron TrailSeeker, Carson 3D, and Nikon Monarch 5-proved very good at bringing in color under harsh conditions.