EL Range: Swarovski's high-tech rangefinder is more than a gimmick

Swarovskis’s new EL Range combines state-of-the-art, top-of-the-range glass with some brilliantly conceived tech to create a rangefinder that you’ll wonder how you ever managed without. Available in 8x42 or 10x42 they offer superb clarity, with 90% light transmission, and have an integrated tilt indicator that incorporates the shot angle into the range calculation, handy for high-seat shooting or stalking in mountainous regions. This gives you precise range measurements from as near as 10m out to 1000m. 

But then things start to get really clever. These days everything and everyone has an app, and the EL Range is no different, but his app is no gimmick.

Precision rangefinding in all conditions

One of the things it permits you to do is to configure your binoculars to your specific needs and the ballistics of your rifle(s). This information is then combined with atmospheric data like air pressure and temperature, delivering an adjusted shooting distance, which is fed out as a precise number of clicks on your rifle scope. This is precision taken to the nth degree.

So far, so impressive, but we have yet to get to the EL Range’s real party piece - the Tracking Assistant. I have heard this feature likened to a car’s airbag: you hope that you’ll never need it, but you’re glad that it's there, and if you ever do have to deploy it, you’ll be forever thankful.

The tool you hope you never need

Any experienced stalker will tell you that even when the shot placement is perfect, striking the heart and lungs, an animal can still run for quite some distance, especially if it has some adrenaline running through its veins. And of course, stalking is not a 100% game - shot placement sometimes goes awry, even for the most accurate of shots.

In these instances your heart is in your mouth until the animal is located and a clean kill is confirmed. The Tracking Assistant, which you can use via the app or the binoculars themselves, helps in these situations by guiding you to the point where your shot was directed, reducing the search for a blood trail.  

Fieldtesting the EL Range rangefinder binoculars

I’m yet to get my hands on a pair, but Frank Stephenson, the GunsOnPegs team's most enthusiastic stalker, has a demo pair and has been giving them a try over the last week or so. I asked him to share his impressions with me.

“The first thing to say,” he told me, “is that the EL Range are fantastic to hold - the ergonomics are fantastic, and they feel lighter in the hand than previous Swarovski rangefinders.”

He added: “I’ve also found the headrest attachment really useful. I’m pretty fit, but even I find that sometimes my arms can get a bit wobbly towards the end of a long stalk or a decent stint in the high seat when I have been doing a lot of glassing. The headrest just offers that little bit of extra stability, which is vital when you’re assessing range or trying to spot movement in the dimming light.”

When it comes to the all-important optics, he’s similarly impressed, but you don’t even have to take his word for it. “One of my stalking buddies had a look through them and he said “[Expletive redacted], these are amazing!”, and he’s not wrong.”

But Frank is most excited by the Tracking Assistant feature, saying: 

It is Murphy’s Law that since I’ve had the EL Range in my possession all of my stalks have been textbook - not that I’m complaining. But I can think of so many occasions in the past when the ability to go straight to where the animal was standing when I pulled the trigger would have helped enormously. There’s nothing worse than having to hunt around for blood spots as the sun sets and the light dwindles. 

No matter how well you mark a spot in your mind, sometimes it is inevitable that you get a bit disoriented, especially if you have to get down from a high-seat - you often have to take your eyes off the target, so to speak, and when you look back your perspective has changed and you can spend a fair amount of time just finding the starting point of the trail.

Like the Swarovski DG,  a monocular that helps you with species identification which we reviewed last year, the EL Range is a beautiful marriage between traditional optics and innovative, intelligently applied tech - but then, would you expect anything less?