Why don’t the pictures of close-up scenes with my IS70 spotter look like what I see through the scope?

» Support Center » Knowledgebase » VistaPix - IS70 FAQs » Why don’t the pictures of close-up scenes with my IS70 spotter look like what I see through the scope?

	Why don’t the pictures of close-up scenes with my IS70 spotter look like what I see through the scope?

Answer The IS70 has a camera and also has a spotting scope. However, they are two separate optical tubes separated center-to-center by almost 3 inches. Because of this, the camera and the main scope actually have two slightly different lines of sight. This causes the image direction in the scope to differ from the image direction in the camera, a shift called the parallax or parallax angle of the optical system.

Parallax is usually not important, because the scope is usually used at distances of 50 feet or more where the angular shift is small. It is important at smaller distances when the camera is zoomed in, where the shift can amount to almost the entire field of view of the camera. (Some IS70s main optics can focus as close as 8 feet.)

It this situation, what the main scope sees won’t be the same as what the camera captures. Parallax will have shifted the scene out of view off to the side.

Article Details

Article ID:

2359

Created On:

Mar 23 2010 04:45 PM