About PerchPrairie
Who we are and how we test
The short version: we buy or borrow the gear, use it in the field for weeks, score it on four axes, and publish the result — whether or not anyone is happy about it. We currently have 63 products from 30 brands in the library, and zero sponsored placements.
How our scores work
Every product gets a single headline score out of five, built from four sub-scores you can see on each review page. The weighting shifts by category — a tripod is judged on stability, a field guide on accuracy — but the discipline is the same:
- Optics / core performance — resolution, brightness, colour, and how the thing behaves at the edges of its range.
- Build — sealing, materials, and what happens after a season of rain, dust and being dropped on a boardwalk.
- Ergonomics — whether you can still use it comfortably in hour four, with cold hands and glasses on.
- Value — performance against real street price, not RRP. This is why a $200 pair can out-score a $2,000 one.
What would make us pull a recommendation: a quality-control slide, a warranty policy that quietly worsens, or a price move that breaks the value case. We retest the library every spring for exactly this reason.