Zeiss Conquest Apia 20-50×65 Spotting Scope
By: Mike Dickerson
Premium and affordable, is this the perfect lightweight & compact backcountry spotter?
Zeiss has just unveiled a new compact spotting scope that deserves serious attention, especially from backcountry or mountain hunters who demand the best lightweight gear available. The new Zeiss Conquest Apia 20-50×65 spotting scope weighs just 47.6 ounces (2.9 lbs.), and measures just 11.75 inches in length, or less than 10 inches long with the eyepiece removed. That’s lighter, shorter, and handier than most comparable spotting scope designs.
If you survey the field of compact spotting scopes with a similar objective lens size and magnification range, the backpack-ready Apia stands apart for its quality and feature richness. You can find quite a few spotting scopes with the same objective lens diameter and a comparable power range, but most are longer and heavier and don’t have a removable eyepiece. You can find some that weigh less, but they will have a smaller objective lens, which transmits less light. You can pay less, but you won’t get the same optical quality. You can also pay a lot more, but any field-condition gains in optical quality will likely be minimal.
Zeiss is known for making some of the best hunting optics on the market thanks to its use of high-end German or Japanese glass. The Conquest Apia’s price tag of about $1,500 isn’t cheap, but it’s competitively priced for the optical quality you’re getting. For comparison, if you want a Swarovski spotting scope of similar size and magnification, you’ll pay more than $4,000. Here’s a closer look at the Apia’s features.
The Apia features premium glass with premium coatings that, according to Zeiss, provide 87 percent light transmission. Aspherical lenses and ED glass result in reduced chromatic aberration, and FieldFlattener technology preserves edge-to-edge sharpness. To verify these claims, I compared this scope side-by-side with my big-name, go-to spotting scope with a larger objective lens, which should have performed better. It didn’t. The Zeiss Apia beat it in every way, delivering a sharper and brighter image at all magnifications with better contrast and color rendition, and it did so in a much smaller, handier package. I was instantly impressed.
This scope is built tough with rubber armor over an aluminum chassis. Lenses are protected from the elements with the Zeiss LotuTec protective coating.
In addition to its great optical quality, I really like this scope’s ergonomics. You get one-handed zoom operation with an included detachable throw lever. The zoom and focus rings are precise and smooth with just the right amount of resistance. The scope is tripod-friendly, with a rotating collar featuring detents at 45 and 90 degrees. You can attach it in the traditional way or via an integral Arca-Swiss mount. The scope has an integrated retractable sunshade and adjustable, removable eye cups.
Importantly, the Conquest Apia has a relatively friendly eye box and generous eye relief with a 17mm exit pupil distance. That’s important for people like me who wear eyeglasses and require a minimum exit pupil distance of about 14mm. Of course, exit pupil size varies with magnification. With this scope, the exit pupil size is 3.2mm at 20x and 1.2mm at 50x. Field of view at 1,000 yards is 144 feet at 20x and 81 feet at 50x.
Happily, Zeiss offers a variety of supporting products, including a stay-on soft case, universal and lightweight tripods, and a magnetic digiscoping adapter system that makes it easy to shoot photos or videos through the scope using your smartphone.
MSRP for the Conquest Apia is $1,499.99. For more information, contact Zeiss; Tel.: (800) 441-3005; Web: https://www.zeiss.com/photonics-and-optics/us/hunting.html.
