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Pros - Superb crispness and detail in image - Excellent light transmission - Budget friendly Cons - No weatherproofing - Included carrying case lacks a shoulder strap

Welcome to my review of the Nikon Aculon A211 8×42 Binoculars. Nikon is renowned for creating high quality optics, but they’ve also been known to deliver a few duds. I was anxious to try these out and see which camp they fell into. Keep reading to find out my thoughts on these budget binoculars.

What Do I Get in the Box?

Sure, it might not be the most important thing to think about, but it’s still important to know what you’re going to be getting for your money. The Nikon Aculon A211 8×42 Binoculars comes with the following items in the box:

• Nikon Aculon A211 8×42 Binoculars
• Carrying Case
• Neck Strap
• Lens caps

The carrying case was not well thought out. The carrying case lacks a shoulder strap, and instead has a belt loop. The belt loop makes very little sense, though, because the case is really too large to be comfortably carried on your belt.

How Much Magnification Do I Get?

With 42mm objective lenses, the Nikon Aculon A211 8×42 Binoculars will provide 8X magnification. Clarity and resolution is outstanding, and images are crisp and detailed. These binoculars suffer from a rather short eye relief, though, at just 12mm. This might make them slightly difficult to use when you’re wearing eyeglasses, but the turn-and-slide twist-up rubber eyecups do a fantastic job of getting the eyecups out of the way if you have eyeglasses on.

The Nikon Aculon A211 8×42 Binoculars have a close focus distance of 16 feet, and the field of view at 1,000 yards is a nicely generous 420 feet. The binoculars are fantastic for scanning the horizon for wildlife, especially with that wide linear field of view.

What Type of Optics Do the Binoculars Have?

Nikon has engineered the Aculon A211 8×42 Binoculars with a porro prism design utilizing BaK–4 prism glass. The objective lenses and 8-power lenses are fabricated with Nikon’s exclusive lead and arsenic free Eco-Glass, making them very friendly to the environment and your health. The lenses are multi-coated, but not fully multi-coated, so you don’t benefit from having all air-to-glass surfaces protected by the antireflective treatment. Even so, the large 42mm objective lenses do a fantastic job of gathering light, and the BaK–4 prisms are designed perfectly for light transmission. I wouldn’t use these binoculars for stargazing, but they are perfectly suitable for use from dawn until dusk.

The eyepiece lenses are aspherical, which provides a flat field of view that is free from distortion. The center focus wheel is nicely ridged and large enough to be easily used even with gloved hands. Nikon has made the Nikon Aculon A211 8×42 Binoculars simple to operate and easy to focus.

What’s the Body Like On These Binoculars?

Nikon’s Aculon A211 8×42 binoculars are coated with a rubber armor that features a non-slip grip and excellent texturing. The grip is quite nice, even in wet conditions, but the closed bridge design makes it difficult to hold these binos one-handed.

For those of you who like to use your binoculars mounted on a tripod, you’ll be happy to hear that a tripod adapter is available (but not included) for use with the Aculon A211 8×42 binoculars.

How Durable Are the Binoculars?

The rubber armor coating provides an excellent level of shock absorption to the binoculars. I’m naturally more careful with porro prism binos, because the design is so much easier to knock out of collimation, but I did accidentally drop these from about 6 feet once. When I picked them up and dusted them off, then looked through them, the image was just as good as before the fall.

Unfortunately, Nikon has neglected to seal these binoculars with O-rings or nitrogen-purge the optics chambers. This means the Nikon Aculon A211 8×42 Binoculars are neither water resistant nor fog proof. If your needs never have you using the binoculars in rainy weather or extremely cold or damp conditions, this won’t affect you. However, if you’re a hunter looking for a good pair of binoculars to help find deer bedded down in the grass, you should probably keep looking.