Home > Consumer Reviews > Meade CaptureView 8x22 Digital Camera Binocular (Compact)

We bought the Meade Capture View today at Radio Shack for $119. We plan to return it. Out of a dozen test pictures, two were excellent, the rest mediocre. Pictures in bright sunlight and medium distance were better than the rest. The software and hookup to the computer worked well. We got some neat pictures of some wild turkeys passing through our yard.

The unsurmountable problem is in the design. You have to keep the two AAA batteries installed to take pictures and to preserve what's in the memory. But if you leave the batteries in, as warned in the instructions, the batteries will run down and you will lose the pictures! So between uses, aand after transfering the pictures to a computer, it's best to disable the batteries. We did it with a piece of tape on the plus terminal.

So, you can't take the dealy on a vacation, unless you have access to a computer to download the images, or you risk the photos disappearing as the battery runs down, or you run out of room in the small. volatile memory to store images. We think this is a serious restriction.

The optical quality of the binocular part was good considering the price. (The camera uses separate optics.)

Thank goodness I [paid less], although I don't like throwing away any amount of money. Oh Capture View, how do I dislike thee? Let me count the ways:

1. Binocs cannot be adjusted for someone like me with fairly close eye spacing--camera is in the way, so I cannot fuse left/right images. Duh!!

2. The on/off/shutter buttons are prominent and thus easy to accidentally press...of course this is why the [people] who designed this thing have it automatically shut off after 10 seconds of idling (unbelievable!!). This latter attractive behavior is not (that I could find) mentioned in the instructions.

3. The quality of the pics at "hi-res" is terrible---the product is just [not good] in this regard. Even resting on a support to prevent motion the pics are of such lousy clarity that they are practically useless. My regular digicam at 640/480 produces vastly better images. In fact, holding my digicam up against the eyepiece of my regular binocs and shooting thru the binocs gives much better pics than the Meade pics. This is my big disappointment with the device...I had hoped to get nice hawk pics, but I see it is virtually useless for a subject with any detail at all.

4. The need to reboot the computer after disconnecting the camera, before re-connecting it. Huh?? This makes the USB hot-swap feature useless.

Oh well...whaddaya want for [money]?? My sincerest condolences to those who wasted [more than] that.

Shame on Meade for putting their name on this piece of... And shame on them for absurdly hyping it in their ad copy.

Okay, I've read the other reviews. Luckily, I just got one from my wife for Christmas BEFORE I read the reviews, or I'd have been skeptical. However, I really like it. The optics are better than my Bushnell 8x22; clearer and brighter. And, the photos are pretty good for a low-cost digital camera. But, since it's essentially an 8 power lens (equivalent to 400mm), if the unit is not properly braced, the photos will (quite naturally) be blurry. Heck, my 35mm with a 300 telephoto would yield pretty lousy shots if not properly braced! Actually, my only complaint is that Meade did not include a camera mount adapter. The use of a small tripod would eliminate the blur caused by an unsteady grip. This can be corrected - as I have already done - by sticking a small square of velcro on the underside of the binoculars (actually the battery compartment door), and sicking the other piece of velcro on the camera mount (such as my pocket-size tripod/car window mount). Problem of blur solved!
If you want better optics in a compact binocular, or a better quality digital camera, expect to pay a good deal more than the cost of the Meade Capture View. But for a good, lightweight (7.1 oz) pocket-size (4.5 x 3.5 x 2.2") binocular with the very cool feature of being able to take a snapshot at the touch of a button, it's a good deal.
Recommended close focus is a minimum 16', and at this distance, I got a acceptably sharp portrait of my cat. At 150' (with tripod!) I got a surprizingly good shot of a cardinal. In high-resolution mode, the camera's 8MB can store up to 45 640x480 photos. The 10 second timer is also a nice feature. Images can be downloaded via included USB cable (CD with installation and image editing software included). Individual images or the entire bank can be cleared with the touch of a button.
Overall, I'm very happy with my Capture View. It'll be in my pocket every time we go hiking or fishing come summer!

This camera has suitable optics when used as binoculars. Perhaps that's the only redeeming quality of this product.

The camera, controls, and software are horrendous. The camera in "high-resolution" mode is only 640x480 and produces extremely poor quality pictures. Since there are no settings or options for controlling picture quality, you get what the camera decides to give you.

The software was horrendous, too. It uses twain drivers for downloading pictures through USB even on Windows XP. There are no options for directly accessing or copying pictures from the camera. By the way, the driver shipped with this product for Windows XP doesn't work -- you must download the driver from the website in order to make it work half-way well under XP. The plug-n-play installation ran three times to install the driver correctly, which is ludicrous.

It's a neat idea, but save your money. This product is a loser and you will be terribly disappointed if you buy it. I can't even imagine why Meade would keep the product alive, except to drain the stock room.

This is binocular melded with a very low end submegapixel digital camera.

I can't even rate the optical portion high, because it was very uncomfortable to use. The spacing and spacing adjustments between the barrels are awkward. My nose has to rest on the USB port entry to be able to see into the lenses.

The camera automatically shuts off in less than 60 seconds, sometimes not enough time to line up a shot. When the shutter engages, it beeps once, but it beeps twice more before shut off, forcing me to look at the camera to ensure I didn't hit the shutter again.

The worst part, is my 10X digital camera opticals gets a tighter closeup than the binocular.