Binoculars That Use Digital Trickery to Give You Super-Sight

Ricoh’s NV-10A enhanced digital binoculars. Ricoh Americas

Whether you’re a dedicated bird watcher or a stealthy sniper, you require a quality pair of binoculars to extend and sharpen your visual capabilities. Ricoh’s new peepers pack in a ton of features so that you can spy that short-tailed albatross even if it’s a foggy day and your hands are shakier than Gene “The Waco Kid” Wilder’s in Blazing Saddles.

Ricoh’s NV-10A Enhanced Binoculars use Pentax’s so-called “Atmospheric Interference Reduction” technology to eliminate interference from fog, rain, or snow that would normally blur and degrade image quality. The image you see is cleaned up with a variety of digital enhancements, including increasing color saturation, de-noising, and adjusting the image contrast. The “PAIR” features can be toggled on and off by buttons on the bottom of the unit that you work with your thumbs.

Digital trickery aside, they’re also just great binoculars. They can magnify distant objects from 6.6 to 13.2 times their original size and keep them steady with image stabilization. The sensor also has a built in infrared mode for use at night. On top of that, you can record what you’re seeing onto an SD card, either as video or as still images. Designed for outdoor use, they’re waterproof and dustproof, and a GPS radio inside lets you record the location of images and videos you take—quite useful if you want to pinpoint the location of a rarely spotted endangered species. Or a pirate ship.

But all of those features come at a hefty price: $4,200. So the NV-10A’s probably aren’t for the casual birder or for your seven-year old nephew. But if you have serious long-view needs, Ricoh’s binocs are packed with plenty of features to optimize the experience.