Binoculars
Focus and adjustment

Binoculars have a focusing arrangement which changes the distance between eyepiece and objective lenses or internally mounted lens elements. Normally there are two different arrangements used to provide focus, "independent focus" and "central focusing":

With increasing magnification, the depth of field – the distance between the nearest and the farthest objects that are in acceptably sharp focus in an image – decreases. The depth of field reduces quadratic with the magnification, so compared to 7× binoculars, 10× binoculars offer about half (7² ÷ 10² = 0.49) the depth of field. However, not related to the binoculars optical system, the user perceived practical depth of field or depth of acceptable view performance is also dependent on the accommodation ability (accommodation ability varies from person to person and decreases significantly with age) and light conditions dependent effective pupil size or diameter of the user's eyes.There are "focus-free" or "fixed-focus" binoculars that have no focusing mechanism other than the eyepiece adjustments that are meant to be set for the user's eyes and left fixed. These are considered to be compromise designs, suited for convenience, but not well suited for work that falls outside their designed hyperfocal distance range (for hand held binoculars generally from about 35 m (38 yd) to infinity without performing eyepiece adjustments for a given viewer).

Binoculars can be generally used without eyeglasses by myopic (near-sighted) or hyperopic (far-sighted) users simply by adjusting the focus a little farther. Most manufacturers leave a little extra available focal-range beyond the infinity-stop/setting to account for this when focusing for infinity. People with severe astigmatism, however, will still need to use their glasses while using binoculars.

Some binoculars have adjustable magnification, zoom binoculars, such as 7-21×50 intended to give the user the flexibility of having a single pair of binoculars with a wide range of magnifications, usually by moving a "zoom" lever. This is accomplished by a complex series of adjusting lenses similar to a zoom camera lens. These designs are noted to be a compromise and even a gimmick since they add bulk, complexity and fragility to the binocular. The complex optical path also leads to a narrow field of view and a large drop in brightness at high zoom. Models also have to match the magnification for both eyes throughout the zoom range and hold collimation to avoid eye strain and fatigue. These almost always perform much better at the low power setting than they do at the higher settings. This is natural, since the front objective cannot enlarge to let in more light as the power is increased, so the view gets dimmer. At 7×, the 50mm front objective provides a 7.14 mm exit pupil, but at 21×, the same front objective provides only a 2.38 mm exit pupil. Also, the optical quality of a zoom binocular at any given power is inferior to that of a fixed power binocular of that power.
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