26mm Nagler vs 27mm Panoptic

Hello all! I am wondering if anyone has done a "head to head" comparison of the new 26mm Nagler to the 27mm Panoptic. I had the 26 Nagler (briefly) but needed to sell it due to financial hardship that I am suffering. I have looked through the 27 Pan, and have been impressed, but have never done a direct comparison.

The reason that I am interested is due to my hardship, I probably will not be able to afford the cost of the Nagler, but ***might*** be able to pull of the Panoptic at the right price used. Then maybe I can "upgrade" to the Nagler when things clear up. I just want opinions and possibly other options that may be available. My current collection of eyepieces are: 17mm Nagler T4, 12mm Nagler T4, 9,7,& 5 Nagler T6; so I need a "low power" eyepiece. My telescope is a StarMaster 12.5 EL. I also use a Paracorr.

For what it is worth, I have used the 31 Nagler and it was too heavy for the scope, and used to own a 35 Panoptic, but the magnification was too low for my taste. By my calculations, the 27 Pan should give me 68x and 1 degree of FOV.

Any ideas or suggestions??

Thanks!

Chuck

*sigh*.

We've done head to head comparisons on multiple scopes with the Nagler 26, Panoptic 27, Nagler 31 and Panoptic 35.

Of the 4, the Nagler 26 came in the sweet spot for image quality, field of view, weight and magnification. It tended to supplant the Pan 35 for large field searching(with 90+% FOV and 33% larger images) ... and the Pan 27 for quality of image/contrast.

The Panoptic 27 is a nice eyepiece.. which I'm sure you'd be happy with....

...but you might consider trading up the Nagler 12mm (ouch!) for a Nagler 26 and get a used big barlow? ( The 26mm becomes a 13 ).

For reference... a Nagler 26 with a big barlow on a 12" SCT came in with a crisper, more generally pleasing, constrasty image than a Radian 12.

Your mileage may, of course, vary signficantly from what we've seen.

Best of Luck.