Nikon Sportstar 8 x 25 Binoculars

I didn’t know a thing about binoculars when I picked up these little beauties prior to a trip to Costa Rica. I lucked into a great choice.

I purchased them based on cost, size and how well I could see the high ceiling beams across the warehouse-like building of my local REI. It’s almost embarrassing to admit that these cost less than $75 and did such a great job at viewing hummingbirds, quetzals and three-toed sloths in the Monteverde Cloud Forest.

These are the 8 x 25s. For the uninitiated, the first number represents how many times closer an object will appear if it were viewed with the naked eye. In this case, images in the Sportstar will appear eight times closer. The second number (25) is the diameter in millimeters of the lens. The larger the number, the brighter the images will appear.

In retrospect, a larger lens might have served me better in the darker parts of the cloud forest, but I managed just fine. And, after backpacking for three weeks, I was happy to have packed such a lightweight set of binoculars.

For a starter pair, these can’t be beat.