Originally Posted By: Russ
...snip...
A 7mm exit pupil vs slightly less than 6mm exit pupil. Given the same glass, 7x50's will beat 7x40's every time. ...snip...


Yes, and no.

One of those "Getting old is no fun" things is that your eyes ability to open up to an exit pupil of 7mm tends to go away

If YOUR eye will only open to say 5mm or 6mm (not uncommon in middle age btw), a 7mm pupil won't help with brightness - on a CENTERED eyepiece - where it does give you an advantage, of course, is that IF you are NOT looking through the center of the eyepiece, the larger exit pupil does help.

BTW, this all assumes that all lenses/prisms/baffles etc in the optical system are sized to fit the larger objective size. There have been more than a few pairs of "less expensive" optics made over the years where the limiting factor was not the objective size, but some other part of the optical train, but the objectives were made large as a selling point
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