The 4 Best Binoculars for Birds, Nature & Outdoors of 2025
Binoculars’ optics consist of three main components that affect their performance: the ocular lenses (in the eyepiece), the objective lenses (the lenses that are farthest away from your face), and the prism, which we’ll discuss further in a bit. The ocular lens is a magnifier. So when you see binoculars’ specifications, the first number signifies how much that lens enlarges what you’re looking at. In the case of all the models we tested, that number is an eight, so you’re getting an image size eight times larger than you see with the naked eye. The objective lens gathers light; its related number—in our case, 42—indicates the diameter of that lens in millimeters. The bigger the lens, the more light it can gather.
We initially chose to limit our tests to 8×42 binoculars for a number of reasons, one being that we found 10x binoculars to be too shaky, like walking around with a fully zoomed telephoto camera lens. Plus, the 42 objective-lens size is perfect for balancing brightness and clarity with weight. Compact binoculars, which have smaller objective lenses, are often much dimmer. They’re not great if you want to truly spot and identify something in the field, though good reasons to use smaller binoculars do exist, as many backpackers and travel-light types will attest. (With that in mind, we tested compact binoculars in 2018, adding a recommendation for that category.)
Other no-go categories that we won’t be touching anytime soon are zoom binoculars or binoculars that include a digital camera. In the former case, you’ll end up with optics so compromised (less light-gathering ability, lower clarity) that the convenience of multiple levels of magnification would be quickly negated. In the latter, the quality of the cameras found inside these neither-here-nor-there binoculars is about a thousand years behind even the most basic modern smartphone. Stay away.
The good news is that the true technological improvements in binoculars over the past few years have come not in gimmicky features, but optics. Whereas 25 years ago you might have needed to spend $500 to get decent, waterproof binoculars from a factory in the Midwest, the manufacturing boom in China has brought us increasingly cheaper versions of familiar products, resulting in a crush of nearly identical binoculars, most of them featuring similar designs.
Most of these binoculars now feature roof prisms, rather than old-fashioned porro prisms. Roof-prism binoculars, which you can identify easily by their “H” shape, draw light in along a straight path through the binoculars, from the objective lens to the eyepiece. Porro-prism binoculars, typically “A” shaped (see photo above), bounce the light along an angled path. Though either design can yield a great pair of binoculars, porro-prism units have, until recently, tended to be cheaper as well as heavier and less durable, though they could potentially yield a better image for less money. These days, roof-prism units are very inexpensive to manufacture, leading to the disappearance of high-end porro units except at the very lowest price points.
Another technology that has gotten less expensive is the ED lens (“ED” stands for “extra-low dispersion”). ED lenses generally weigh less and transmit light better than standard lenses. Though all of our tested binoculars performed well, of our four picks, only the top two use ED lenses.
The last element of today’s great, affordable binoculars is optical coatings. Lens coatings perform various functions, such as improving light transmission, reducing glare, and keeping colors true. Coating quality and levels used to be a key differentiator between cheap and expensive binoculars, but these days, lens coating technology has come down in price. All of our picks use the highest level, which is full multi-coating, meaning that all glass surfaces—most binoculars have between 10 and 16 such surfaces, called optical elements—are coated.
Another feature we deemed essential was proper functioning for users with glasses. Your binoculars work only when the proper distance between your eye and the binoculars’ ocular lens (the lens on the eyepiece end) is maintained. Glasses would increase that distance if you didn’t have a way to adjust the inboard or outboard position of the ocular lens. This feature is called eye relief, and the standard recommendation is that those who wear glasses need a minimum of 15 mm of adjustability. Old-fashioned eye relief meant a pair of rubber cups that rolled down to bring your glasses to the proper distance; those cups are still found on some binoculars, but we don’t recommend them, because they’ll eventually stiffen or even tear. Preferable are eyepieces that twist downward into a more compact position, a feature that all of our picks have.
But even with all these improvements, binoculars will vary in important ways. A few models close focus down to 5 feet away or even a little closer, though at least one popular model reaches no closer than 16 feet away, making them a no-go for seeing butterflies and other up-close objects. The field of view (how large an area you see when you look out into the distance) is also variable and differed by more than 20 percent across models tested for this review.
Below our midrange (roughly $150 to $350), the quality differences become apparent. Above our range’s higher end, you don’t necessarily get much, if any, performance advantage. Most brands we investigated tend to offer at least a couple different models of full-size (versus compact) binoculars, claim their models are waterproof (or at least water-resistant), and offer many models with a no-questions-asked lifetime and transferable return policy. Combine this with continuing improvements in glass and optical coating (or at least, a drop in manufacturing cost to the point where higher-quality lenses are now widely affordable), and we appear to be living in something of a golden age of binoculars—one birding website alone offers more than 150 models at our midrange prices.
To find a manageable group of testing finalists, we first eliminated companies that make only one model and that don’t exist outside of their Amazon presence. We also ruled out companies with just one model in our target price range, based on the logic that those binoculars are less likely to be widely available in the future, particularly if they get damaged and you need to return them. During our 2016 testing, this left us with 19 models of 8×42 binoculars, priced mostly under $350. We tested 10 compact binoculars in 2018, and then tested an additional six 8×42 models for a 2020 update.
Warranties
One question you’ll likely have when buying binoculars will be about warranties, especially for brands you’ve never heard of. And the question is valid.
Binoculars get beat up and dusty, and cheap ones go out of alignment in a few weeks or with a good knock, resulting in double vision or blurry patches. Nearly all companies I was able to reach offer a full, transferable, lifetime warranty of the “you can drive over it with a truck” type, but I recommend researching warranties before buying any model, because their details may change in the future.
But take some comfort in knowing that binoculars are now more rugged than ever. They’re about as waterproof as possible, meaning all of the pairs we recommend are sealed against dust and can handle immersion—though if you drop them into a lake, you’ll still need to dive because they don’t float, yet.
