Skip wrote:

I keep seeing this bandied about as the premium for IS/VR, but nowhere do I
see it in actual practice. It is about a $400-500 increase in price over
the non IS version, if such does exist in the lineup.

Canon's 8x25 IS Binoculars retail for $200 after rebate.

While implementation complexity (& cost) will obviously vary, this does
suggest at least that a low performance IS system has to cost less than
$200.

In general, I think that the "+$400-ish" rule of thumb is probably
around the mark (retail), which means that anyone claiming "double",
"triple", etc are only doing their comparisons based on one or two
cheap lenses, rather than considering a broader range of IS lenses.


-hh