Review on 🔭 Celestron 52330 TrailSeeker 65 - 45 Degree Spotting Scope in Black by Robert Espinoza

This is my first scope and I use it mostly for bird watching. The scope has fantastic optics for the price (especially at lower powers). It also feels well built, with images that are crisp. I don't see any chromatic aberration when using it. The eye relief is great (and that's very valuable since I use glasses) and the field of view is quite large given its size. It's not very difficult to carry around. While the focus knobs are easy to use on paper (with fine and coarse focus knobs), in the field it's downright terrible. No matter what I do, at 200 meters or more it's almost impossible to get the bird in focus properly, even at 20x zoom. Despite being a more expensive scope, I've compared it to my birding instructor's Swarovski ATS and the focusing mechanism on this (and other more expensive scopes) just blows this one out of the water. The scope is also pretty useless at 30x and up, and the image brightness drops drastically and the focus problems only get worse. I would say that for birding over 30x magnification it's not worth starting with this scope. The scope also suffers from poor design in some places. The eyepiece has a metal cap that must be screwed down instead of the more convenient rubber cap, making it difficult to use in the rain. There are no attractions on it. The case is in two pieces with threads in between that occasionally come loose (not a big issue as I can screw it back in, but no matter what I do) it never feels solid. I would say for the low price this is a very good scope for beginners, but if you have more money to spend, be sure to choose a higher class scope, test it in the field with lots of focus mechanism exercises.