Great review. Those Carl Zeiss DF 7x40s look excellent and appear to be solidly built. Hopefully they should last a lifetime and more. A great piece of 'Red Dawn' history and very collectible and its good to see that they are actually being used rather than being kept in the back drawer of a collectors cupboard.

What I find quite amazing today though is the that the quality of even the cheapest binoculars are very good and may well have BAK4 prisms and multicoated optics.

Last year I picked up a new pair of Bresser 10x50 high definition binoculars for £14 or around $22 from a local discount supermarket. They are actually very good with very good optics, with good colour rendition, sharp and clear focus and are reasonably lightweight for a 10x50 pair. The only downside is some barrel distortion around the periphery view.

http://www.bresseroptics.co.uk/details.php?id=351

I find that I take these el cheapo binoculars out more often than a more expensive pair simply because if they get lost or damaged then it really is not a big deal.

Charity and second hand shops are also another way to find the occasional binocular gem for only a few dollars. That is what happened to my grandfathers Swift Audubons after he passed away. My grandmother gave them to a charity shop, apparently unaware that the top end Audubons had cost so much when my grandfather bought them in the early 1980s for birdwatching after he had retired. She wasn't impressed when I told here how much my grandfather had actually paid for them.