A friends partner ... looking to buy either a Bushnell Legend or an Olympus EXPS, 12-50. ... mostly into hillwalking and climbing and flys helicopters ... sounds like something for the rucksack but of good quality.
You haven't given anything like enough information. You can't really use binoculars while you're flying a helicopter, you need one hand for the stick and the other for the lever.
Binoculars are very personal things, I'd recommend that your friend should reads some binocular "use" and "buying" guides - there are hundreds of them about on the Internet, most give good advice. If two or three of them agree on some aspect of the advice it's probably good advice.
...or any thoughts on ones similar?
Why "ones similar"? You seem to be saying that the decision is practically made already. That's a bit strange. I'd say that the first thing to decide is the two numbers, then whether or not they are to be waterproof, then what the third number (the price
) should be. Everything about binoculars is a compromise except possibly the distance of closest focus, which if I were buying them I'd say shouldn't be more than a couple of metres. Binoculars with 50mm lenses are quite a lot bulkier than those with 30 or 40mm lenses but are still just about portable enough for walking. My personal view is that for portable hand-held use, 7x50 or 8x50 are about the best, but it does depend a lot on your hands and what else you're carrying. I find even fairly large binoculars comfortable to hold but not everyone does. If I wanted to take a pair of binoculars camping (unlikely) I'd probably take my 8x30s as they're much more compact than x50s. Actually if I'm going to travel and haven't any particularly planned need for binoculars I'll probably take a small monocular. Magnification as high as 12x is definitely too much for hand held use unless they have image stabilization (IS). Even if the image is steady (with 12x magnification without IS you're looking for a wall or a tree most of the time) it will be a lot less bright in 12x50 than it will in 7x50, so in poor light the higher magnification will be a disadvantage. Bear in mind that there's a very big difference between no magnification and 7x, but not very much between 7x and 12x. I've used cheap binoculars and expensive ones. If I bought expensive I'd worry about leaving them on a train, or breaking them, or having them stolen. I can buy half a dozen pairs of cheap binoculars for less than the price of one expensive pair so I can both cover a wider range of uses (as I don't have to pick just one magnification/size) and get a lot more use out of them because there's always a pair handy. Having said that, binoculars with good optical quality can be worth the extra money as long as you don't drop them off the face of a cliff while you're climbing. I have some rubber armoured waterproof binoculars with a built-in compass but I only use them when sailing on boats, and the compass is only any use on boats that aren't made of steel.
