An easy twist of the eyepiece brings magnifications from 50x to 100x without refocusing or even with parfocal optics at least having to change eyepieces. I was looking at Celestron's Ultima line and noticed that variable magnification eyepieces cost just as much as fixed magnification/focal length eyepieces. With variable magnification, the value of a Barlow is seriously diminished, because who needs to double the number of effective eyepieces when you can get a large, continuous range of them in one eyepiece? The eye relief does vary a little with different magnifications, but other than that I could not find a reason why this kind of eyepiece should not become my low to mid power eyepiece of choice. It covers from about 10mm to about 20mm, if I remember right, and that translates to between 50x and 100x for a 1000mm focal length telescope like mine. Why pay money for multiple quality optics in the 10mm to 20mm range, when they can get them all in one eyepiece of the same qualit
What about achromatic lenses? 6 lense systems are quite popular and expensive. Simple 3 lense systems can be quite cheap and bad quality. 4 lense Plossl are better and 5-6 give eye relief, larger AFOV, etc. Given the same number of lenses and line of product (material quality and design specifications), are not the variable eyepieces better than the fixed eyepieces?
I am talking about telescopes here, not microscopes. I am also comparing apples to apples: eyepieces with the same number, quality, and types of lenses.

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