Mako's Magnifiers
I was browsing through different forums, when I stumbled upon this discussion that mentioned our magnifiers. When I saw some of the comments/ reviews of our magnifiers, I couldn't help but to post some information on our magnifiers to help shed some light on the improvements that have been made over time.
While admittedly, the first generation of our magnifiers had some reliability issues. We replace all defective magnifiers free of charge, as we do with any other product of ours that has failed its user.
Currently, we are on our third generation of magnifiers. The first generation, as many know, had some issues with reliability. Many people claimed that “something has shaken loose”. Under investigation, we discovered that the internal prism would rattle loose when subjected to heavy vibration.
The second generation magnifiers, while fixed of this previous design flaw, received a few complaints that the magnification was less than stated on the magnifier. We also received a few returns on magnifiers that had shown signs of fog/ water penetration into the internal lenses.
Again, we went back and redesigned our magnifiers to remedy the above concerns as well as to exceed performance expectations. The steps we took we as follows; within the lenses, there is a +/- .5x magnification variable during production. That means that 3x magnifier might come in as high as 3.5x or as low as 2.5x (with the vast majority falling between 2.8x and 3.2x), and the 5x could be from 5.5x to 4.5x etc... Now, all of our magnifiers are designed to be +.5x higher. Our 5x magnifier is in reality a 5.5x magnifier with extreme variances at a true 5x up to 6x (with the vast majority between 5.3x to 5.7x).
The concern of Waterproofing/ Fogproofing was addressed by improving the seals around the lenses and by filling the tube with nitrogen. The end result is a magnifier whose internal optics will NOT rattle loose, whose optics are of equal or better magnification than specified, and will NOT fog up or fill with water.
For identification purposes, the new magnifiers contain a colored ring around the objective bell that has MAKO and the magnifier's magnification level written on it.
http://www.makosecurity.com/Merchant2/graphics/00000001/MD3XMGNF_full.jpg