With all the emphasis these days on big scopes, it takes courage to introduce a new 60mm. The Premiere from Bausch and Lomb, is designed to be a cut above their venerable Bushnell Spacemaster. It is a compact, attractive, partially rubber armored scope, with nice curves...obviously in the same physical family as the Elite. Weight and balance are both excellent. It sits very stably on top of a tripod, and carries very well.

If you take a look at the NEED charts, you will see that its optical performance looks pretty good too. With the 15-45 zoom, low power views (through 20x) are very good...sharp, contrasty, and with good detail. Even at high power, the scope holds it's resolution very well...however, the image is considerably less bright and suffers from some zoom artifact. The situation is aggravated by the fact that the eyepiece does not have a fold down eyecup. The hard rubber cup holds your eye back from the full view. If you wear eyeglasses, the image seems to float somewhere down the barrel of the scope. With my glasses off the view is much more pleasing...brighter and with better contrast than I would have expected. Eyepiece choice has always plagued Bausch and Lomb/Bushnell. Eyepieces are very often the major limiting factor in the view their scopes are able to provide. Several promising scopes, the 70mm and ED Spacemaster come to mind, have been doomed by less than adequate eyepieces. (For NEED Test comparison charts for the Premiere take a look at NEED Test Revisited.)

The Premiere probably deserves better eyepieces. It has several nice touches that might make you consider it even without: the tripod mount has the extra hole for video tripods, the lens cap for the objective is attached and seals the scope well in the carrying mode, the whole thing feels like a high quality piece of equipment, and it is notably light weight and compact. For the birder who just wants a scope for those rare occasions when you have to have one, it might be just the ticket...if and when B&L upgrades the eyepieces, it might even be a contender for the serious scope birder.