Anita Hamilton wrote a short piece on the Bushnell Instant Replay Digital Binoculars in the June 28 edition of Time Magazine. This is the second time I’ve seen Instant Replay Binoculars this week. On Saturday, my wife and I and a couple of friends attended the Philadelphia Phillies – Kansas City Royals game at the new Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia.
In between innings, I ducked out of the right field upper deck stands to buy some refreshments. When I reached the concession area, the crowd around a guy standing there with what looked like a video camera was bigger than the line for food. I quickly bought my hot dogs and drinks, and joined the crowd to see what was so interesting.
It turned out that a Phillies fan had been using a set of binoculars with a small video screen on them. He was showing people replays of pitches because hits were hard for him to follow. I guess he hadn’t had the binoculars for very long. When I got home, I quickly browsed the Internet, and found that Bushnell had a set of binoculars on the market that looked like the ones I saw.
The article in Time Magazine says that the Instant Replay binoculars cost $600, but they are available from Amazon.com and a number of other resellers for considerably less. I think that these binoculars are an interesting fusion of binoculars, a digital camera, and a clip-length video camera. It has 2.1-megapixel still image capture capabilities. That would allow you to capture a pretty good 8×10 photo, if the digitizer is good. The video capabilities are probably not unlike that found in some mobile phones today. Unit specs say that it can capture 30-second video clips.
I think that Bushnell Instant Replay Binoculars are an interesting idea. I’d definitely consider buying a set if I was a season ticket holder for one or more professional sports teams. If I had that much money to spend on entertainment, an additional $300 or 400 for a gadget like this probably wouldn’t hurt too much. I’ll have to look around the Internet some more and see if there are sample images and clips captured by the binoculars.