I delivered the Sportsman's Guide 10x50's to Bruce Grim today. He was very impressed with the imagery as well as construction, and is ordering a pair for himself. These will be part of the inventory of SPOC-2, so SLAS members and guests will have a chance to try them out. I dropped off 2 pair. He also told me of his own experience in a side-by-side comparison of the Bears with Fujinon 16x70mm. In his opinion, the Bears were a tad sharper (!) but the Fuji's had slightly better throughput (expected from the better coatings). I had a hard time with this, but I trust Bruce's judgement in telescope matters completely, he's been doing this a lot longer than I have, and I've been in the game about 34 years now! I would like to perform a comparison myself, though. There is a difference between general quality of a product line, and the quality of individual units. Maybe he got the best Bear ever made, and a worn-out Fuji. But, who knows? I told him about our plans for Binopalooza, and he wants to attend. I also got to examine his mini-parallelogram mount. I liked the way he didn't make the arms overly-long. Some of the parallelogram mounts I've seen have a height range of 2' up to 8', and I just can't see making arms that long unless you plan to have a group of toddlers and NBA stars at the same star-party. He also used square aluminum tubing from the home improvement center, making drilling a whole lot easier. His use of double-springs eliminated the counterweight, another nice feature, plus it mounts on a standard commercial camera tripod. I found an old wooden tripod off of a Japanese refractor in my basement, and will use that as a foundation for my own mount, borrowing some of Bruce's ideas...the short arms, namely...but I think I'll use round aluminum tubing just because I've got it on-hand already. I want to have this thing done before Binopalooza. I plan to size the arms for my own use rather than "one size fits all". Hopefully Bruce will bring his set-up so everyone can see it. Chuck __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? LAUNCH - Your Yahoo! Music Experience http://launch.yahoo.com