With technology being such a significant part of our lives these days, it is easy for our children to miss out on the outdoor fun we had as kids. Living Squad is a family-orientated brand that designed its products with exploration and activity in mind. They encourage children to explore the outdoors and fall in love with nature with their unique products.
Living Squad strives for excellent quality products and is one of the best tech-free kids’ gadgets. You could call these binoculars a true optical device within a youthful body, making this a perfect gadget for young explorers seeking new discoveries.
Type of Binoculars
There are two types of binoculars: Porro Prism and Roof Prism. To help you understand what this means, let us start by explaining what prisms are. A prism is a triangular transparent object that refracts light against surfaces to separate white light into a color spectrum. In binoculars, prisms are pieces of glass that act as mirrors.
Prisms are used to reflect the incoming light from the objective lens to create an enlarged image for you to observe. The image generated by the objective lens is usually upside down, thus prisms are also responsible for reverting the image so you can see it the correct way around.
The Design of Living Squad Binoculars
The ergonomic binoculars will inevitably take a tumble, but luckily Living Squad kept this in mind when designing the product. The light and compact binoculars have a shockproof body made with aluminum and a rubber harness intended to absorb shock when it falls. Living Squad guarantees it will survive any accidents and because it is so light and compact, your children will have no problem taking it with them on all of their adventures.
Living Squad has designed the binoculars so that they have adjustable sizes and can be used with spectacles. The kids’ binoculars have rubber eyepieces to protect your little ones from injury or scratching their glasses. Just a quick tip-be sure you are looking through the right side of the binoculars. It sounds silly to mix up which end to look through. But because of the rubber eyepieces, people have gotten it wrong.
They have also included an anti-slip grip made from rubber on the sides of the binoculars to prevent it from falling out of sweaty or shaky palms. Living Squad refers to these grips as their ergonomic design because it creates a comfortable place for you to put your hands while preventing the binoculars from falling.
One of the activities suggested by the brand to take your binoculars on is boating. We haven’t personally tested this, but the manufacturer does claim that these binoculars are water-resistant. We don’t recommend, however, dropping it into a pool of water.
The Living Squad Binoculars come in an array of color combinations; green and dark blue, purple and light blue, dark blue and black, light blue and pink, and finally red and dark blue. The large color palette is to help kids generate an interest in the product as they are more likely to use the gadget that has their favorite color on it.
Safety
As mentioned above, the binoculars have foldable rubber eyepieces to prevent any injury to your young one’s eyes and scratching to their glasses. The binocular also includes an easy-to-install quick-release neck strap and wrist strap to prevent your kid from getting tangled up during their adventure.
The neck strap does not come pre-installed but don’t worry; it’s easy to do! You detach the strap from the buckle by squeezing the clips. You thread the lanyard with the buckle through the side holes found on the binoculars and then thread the buckle through the loop. Tighten it by pulling the buckle and reattach it to the straps. And you’re all set!
Magnification Strength
The Living Squad magnification strength is 8x. This is just great for kids, as a high-power binocular is more challenging to focus on, resulting in younger kids not being able to receive a clear image of what they’re looking for, which ruins all the fun.
An advantage of a moderate magnification is the larger exit pupil. The higher the magnification, the smaller the exit pupil. But what is an exit pupil? An exit pupil is a bright circle you see in the center of each eyepiece when you hold the binocular away from your eyes, with the lens pointing to bright light.
Why is the exit pupil important? The larger the diameter of this circle is, the brighter your view field will be, which is essential when using your binoculars in dark situations, such as viewing the stars. A pair of binoculars with a modest magnification enables a wider view, making expeditions more enjoyable for your children because they can see objects more easily and clearly.
Competing brands like Bresser Junior Compact Binoculars and National Geographic Children’s Binoculars struggle with their 6x magnification binoculars because kids can only view an object up to 6 times bigger; putting the Living Squad Binoculars ahead of their products.
Field of View (FoV)
The Field of View is the measurement of the width of the area you can see through your binoculars. The more powerful the magnification, the narrower your view will be. The Living Squad Binocular has a wide field of view of 366ft. This means that if you’re standing 1000 feet away from the object, you’re viewing when looking through the Living Squad Binoculars, your field of view is 366 feet wide.
A wider field of view makes expeditions like bird viewing easier because your kid can follow the bird’s movement around. A wider FoV makes targeting a moving object easier and a lot more entertaining.
Objective Lens Diameter
Before we talk about the objective lens diameter, we should probably explain what the objective lens is. The objective lens is the lens opposite the one you look into. More specifically, the lens at the opposite end of the binoculars to the eyepiece.
Living Squad has an objective lens diameter size of 21mm. The diameter size refers to the inside diameter of the objective lens. A larger objective diameter means the binocular has a greater light-collecting ability resulting in a higher resolution and brighter image. Although, a large-diameter objective lens means the binoculars are bigger and heavier. Thus, kid’s binoculars often have smaller objective lenses.
Regular binoculars have an objective lens diameter between 32 to 42mm. In comparison, the Living Squad Binoculars’ objective lens diameter is on the lower side. The disadvantage of this is that these binoculars would not be suitable to be used in dark situations, stopping you from having stargazing or nighttime spy adventures.
Interpupillary Distance (IPD)
The interpupillary distance is the measurement of the distance between your eyes. Living Squad has designed its binoculars to have an adjustable interpupillary distance; their distance ranges from 2 inches to 2.6 inches. This means you can customize it to your little one’s face.
A tip to ensure the binoculars will fit your child’s face – measure the distance between the center of your child’s eyes. To safely measure the distance, have your child stand up straight, looking straight ahead, and use a plastic ruler to measure from your right eye’s pupil to the left eye’s pupil. That will be your child’s interpupillary distance.
How to Focus the Binoculars
To ensure you properly focus the Living Squad Binoculars, they provide you with some tips. The below tips explain how to adjust the focus on the left and right eyepieces separately. Each side of the binoculars has a diopter adjustment dial, which is the eyepiece you look through.
Close your right eye, look through the binoculars and find an object with your left. Rotate the right eyepiece until the image is clear and precise.
Switch eyes. Close your left eye and look through the binoculars and find an object with your right. Once again, rotate the left eyepiece until the image is clear.
Open both eyes, and look through the binoculars and find an object to focus on. You should have a clear and focused image.
To focus after accounting for the differences between your eyes (the process above), you can simply use the center focus wheel.
What’s Inside the Box?
- A cleaning cloth,
- Neck strap,
- Wrist strap,
- Carabiner,
- Nylon case,
- The Living Squad Binoculars,
- Instruction manual.
Conclusion
We’re not the only ones that believe the Living Squad Binoculars are an excellent product for your kids to enjoy. Outdoors World has rated the Living Squad Binoculars as the Number 1 compact binoculars and binoculars for kids.
These binoculars would make a splendid companion for birdwatching, hiking, concerts, sporting events, boating, and hunting.
While this review is about their binoculars, Living Squad has another product that calls to their outdoor exploration junkies. They have a digital camera that doubles as a walkie-talkie; how cool! If you want to kit your kids out with an exploration pack, why not consider the Living Squad digital camera and walkie-talkies?
The walkie-talkie is a helpful tool for your child’s outdoor expeditions; it can be used to video record their findings and play music through its MP3 player to keep your child company. It comes equipped with rechargeable batteries, removable SD cards, and 32G of space.
Both the binoculars and digital camera/ walkie-talkies are great products that will be helpful on all your bird-watching and stargazing family expeditions.
I will take the grand children on a beach walk. We will be nature explorers. We hope to discover the diverse fish, animal, vegetation and insect world in our vicinity. We will look for gar fish skimming the water. Or the muskrat and beaver who show up occasionally. Looking up we will hope to spot an Osprey, Gold Eagle or the Bald Eagle who has decided to take up living near us. Spotting bull frogs who try to camoflage is a fun activity. Or the toads peaking up at us and then hopping away . The children do their best to try and catch one. Using the binoculars we can look deep in the woods hoping to spot a deer and maybe a fawn. The binoculars are great to study insects and their habits .They enable us to get a good, detailed look at the features. The closer looks help distinguish different varieties of catepillars, spiders, and lady bugs.
We can take a close look at leaves and see how they differ. Maybe we can look up in the trees with our binoculars in hopes to see birds. The binoculars will help distinguish the type of bird. Maybe we will see a wood pecker or a porcupine sitting in the tree. A wonderful and fun learning experience which of course will not feel like learning at all.
So much to explore and discover using the binoculars.
We live in Forks, Washington, home of the ultimate hiking trails and beaches, but we serve overseas and aren’t home much to enjoy it. We have home leave this summer and are taking our 7 year old daughter out and into nature! We are planning to go to Ruby beach, the Hall of Mosses, La Push and the Olympic Park. Ruby beach has some gorgeous tide pools and some great stacks! But it’s the Hall of Mosses I’m most excited to show her. There are a lot of bald eagles and a few golden eagles in the area that have her interest as well. Her first eagle sighting, she was so excited she started talking jibberish! She didn’t realize how big they were. While I’ve never seen one in the wild here, there are also several kinds of grouse that I’d like to show her. I think she’d get a real kick out of seeing them dance! We’ve seen the killdeer on the beach, she gets so tickled when they put their heads down and run, I know she’d love to watch the other birds dance.
My kids and I love nature and the outdoors, and we would take these binoculars on all our adventures! My kids especially love birdwatching, so it would be awesome to take them along during the golden eagle migration to have a better chance to get a good look at the birds.
We also enjoy hiking and would take these along on all our adventures in the Rocky Mountains. There are so many amazing trails out there, these would be amazing to be able to appreciate and enjoy the scenery even more. My kids would love using them to study any wildlife we may happen to spot, they all really love animals. We’ve seen bears, moose, elk, mountain goats, sheep and all kinds of birds and smaller critters. That’s always a highlight of our trips.
Thank you so much for the chance to win this awesome prize! We’re really looking forward to going on some great adventures this summer, and these would only add to that!
I’ll be taking my grandson, who turns 3 next month to Mt. Rainier National Park. It’s only about 1.5 hours away, so not so hard to get to. From there, we’ll do a little hiking, exploring and discovering until we get hungry. I’ll be bringing lots of yummy and healthy foods to eat on our little picnic. My husband and I are retired (and over 62), so we have the Golden Eagle Pass which allows us to enter the park for free as often as we’d like. It’s my favorite park – I never get tired of it. We’ve been exploring that park for many many years with our kids when they were young, and these days, more often by ourselves. I’m so excited that our grandson is getting to the age where we can start taking him on longer hikes. We’ve taken him on shorter ones closer to home, and he loves them. Given the choice, he’d rather be outside than inside, so I think he’s a budding nature lover, which is just fine by me!
Our neighborhood has a really great park with a lake and walking trails. We have a bunch of ducks and turtles and even an alligator that lives in and around the lake. There are also lots of other little animals, like squirrels, running around. I would also take my daughter to the other parks in the area that have trails through the woods where you can discover different types of trees and plants. I really want to encourage her to love nature and treat animals of all sizes and shapes with kindness, even the little bugs. Although mosquitos are hard to love sometimes. I have always found it very relaxing to walk through nature and take it all in by getting up close and personal with everything around me. I hope my daughter feels the same way in appreciating the Earth and everything that lives on it. We would definitely take these binoculars on all of our adventures!
With two younger kids, and living in Florida, we would use these binoculars on all sorts of adventures! On the coastal waters, we would be on the lookout for dolphins and manatees, and on nature trail boardwalks inland, it would be a quest to see alligators (from a safe distance – which binoculars would certainly help with!). At the beach, they can look for large ships sailing along the horizon, and right in our neighborhood, they can find butterflies, birds and cotton-tail bunnies. My kids love learning about all of the diverse wildlife we have in our state, and it’s so exciting for them to then go see those animals out in the wild.
They would also be thrilled to use binoculars to watch a rocket launch from Cape Canaveral. When conditions are right, we can see the rockets far away from our house, but nothing beats taking a day trip and watching a few miles away from the launch pad. Last time my oldest actually asked if we could get some binoculars for the next time, so we would be so excited to have these awesome binoculars designed especially for kids!
We opened our boxes today and we’re thrilled to see the binoculars. The ergonomic binoculars will inevitably take a tumble, but luckily Living Squad kept this in mind when designing the product. The light and compact binoculars have a shockproof body made with aluminum and a rubber harness intended to absorb shock when it falls. Living Squad guarantees it will survive any accidents and because it is so light and compact, your children will have no problem taking it with them on all of their adventures.