KANSAS CITY, Mo. – The idea behind Bushnell Corp.’s Instant Replay sounds great: high-quality binoculars equipped to shoot digital photos or streaming video.
Who wouldn’t want to grab solid footage of great athletes – be they Barry Bonds or little Johnny on the soccer field – without having to lay out the money for field-level seats or wrestle with a zoom lens?
And one day, sports fans, we will find the easy solution.
But the Instant Replay is not it.
The binoculars feature eight-fold magnification and, at a pound and a half, are relatively easy to hold, although the hand strap is uncomfortably loose on all but the most ham-handed of users. Unlike regular binoculars, the unit doesn’t bend to fit the user’s face. It can be adjusted horizontally, however, and is comfortable.
The Instant Replay comes with a built-in 2.1-megapixel digital camera and the ability to record video at 15 frames per second for up to 30 seconds. It ships with a 16-megabyte compact flash card.
A flip-up LCD screen allows you to see what you’re shooting, and the onboard software lets you cycle through your images and delete the ones you don’t want.
Now the bad news.
Despite the great binocular capability, the camera is using its own lens, which accomplishes nowhere near the same magnification. It also is difficult to focus, and you are better off using the LCD screen to adjust the sharpness of your images and video.
I took the Instant Replay to a Kansas City Royals game. From the upper deck, I could see the batters’ expressions at the plate, but images appeared to be shot from only a few rows in front of me without magnification.
The unit is bulky and requires a very steady hand to keep from jostling when pressing the shutter. It does come with a place to attach a tripod, which is probably the only way to get sharp images.
And for a product being marketed to sports fans and meant for action shots, it has a very slow shutter. Every time I tried to get an image of the pitcher, either I missed the ball entirely or got a blurry image that looked as if the guy was chucking a giant Tylenol.
My wife, a professional photographer, tried her hand with it and got similar results.
Simply put, you need to be fairly close to the action to get quality shots. And if you’re that close, why do you need binoculars?
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