Svbony SV503 80mm f/7 telescope review – Heavenly views

At some point, after picking up a telescope (and sticking with it) you’ll wonder if a more expensive telescope provides better views. We’ll spare you the optical glass rabbit hole that follows and just tell you straight: it does. But extra-low dispersion (ED) glass doesn’t come cheap. At least, it didn’t. Svbony‘s 80mm SV503, one of a family of ED glass refractors, puts higher-quality views into your hands for what is, relatively, not much money.

There’s more to this optical tube assembly (OTA) than just fancy glass, but there are also drawbacks to plonking down R9,900 for one. On the upside, the bits supplied are of uniformly excellent quality. On the downside, not all the bits are supplied. But if you’re taking astronomical observation seriously, that’s less of a drawback. If you’re just starting out, a kit telescope might be a better first choice.

Tubular

The Svbony SV503 arrives as a solidly constructed tube in a box, with everything the scope consists of already in place. The body is of durable construction, the dew shield (the raised bit at the front) can be extended and retracted, and the lens cap is similarly durable. The shield has soft felt pads to prevent any paint scuffing when you slip it on and off.

The focuser is a major highlight. A dual-speed focuser — it uses a well-machined track instead of the Crayford ball bearing design — accepts both 1.25in and 2in diagonals and eyepieces. It can be rotated by loosening a thumbscrew and twisting the whole assembly without bothering your focus and the focus and tension can both be locked with similar thumbscrews.

Another highlight is the stock inclusion of tube rings and a dovetail plate for fitting it to a mount. The rings use the same felt padding as the lens cap to protect the tube itself and the build for both the rings and dovetail are as high-quality as the rest of the assembly.

The last item is the 80mm objective lens, which deserves its own space. If you’ve done any astronomy you might notice what’s missing: a finder-scope and mount, a telescope mount, tripod, diagonal, and eyepieces. It’s a real case of BYOG (Bring Your Own Gear). That’s… surprisingly worth it.

Heart of glass

The reason you’d purchase a Svbony SV503 80mm is that you’re after excellent wide-field views that don’t compromise on image quality. Part of its success in this format is the increased f-ratio — this is an f/7 as opposed to the usual short-tube 80mm telescope’s f/5. Sparing you the technical minutia, the SV503 short-tube refractor sidesteps the shortcomings of its design — chromatic aberration being the main one — by using S-FPL51 for one of its objective elements.

The ED glass objective — the single element of it — minimises chromatic aberration by bringing converging light waves (blue and red) to the same focal point. This is an issue with shorter achromat refractors and normally results in a blue or purple fringe around bright objects like Jupiter or the Moon. The S-FPL51 here lets Svbony keep the aggressive light cone without this fringing taking place.

In practice, this SV503’s 80mm objective lens performs far more effectively than a standard achromat. Wide-field views are cleaner and brighter thanks to Svbony’s ultra-wide-band lens coating, seeming to look deeper into the night sky even in light-polluted areas. Star colour is more prominent than a similarly-sized objective without the ED glass and it even outperforms larger achromat objectives at the same task.

The enhanced sharpness — it really must be seen to be believed — also allowed for increased magnification. Normally you’d take a telescope like this down to a 7mm eyepiece but the SV503 will render sharp images, atmosphere-permitting, until you start seeing the reflections of the veins in your eye. That’s about a 0.4mm exit pupil, which is manageable if you have a sufficiently advanced eyepiece in your arsenal. On that note, we tested everything from Kellners to Nagler eyepieces in this scope, and edge correction is fantastic. By which we mean, if you see aberrations they’ll have come from your eyepieces and not from the SV503.

A word about the mount

The Svbony SV503 80mm is only as good as the gear you have it mounted on. Pop it onto a sturdy enough tracking mount, like the Celestron CGEM (computerise German equatorial mount), and you will, with a decent camera setup, manage impressive long-exposure astrophotography images. If you’re a purely visual observer then pairing it with the mount above, the Svbony SV225 (R4,600) manual alt-az mount and a light tripod (we used a Celestron SLT tripod for much of this review) will turn this into an excellent grab-and-go scope. There’s no cooldown needed for the glass and the image rendition is excellent.

Svbony SV503 80mm verdict

The Svbony SV503 80mm is an amazing telescope for wide-field visual observing, offering a premium glass that verges on the performance of fluorite objectives at a fraction of the price. You can do better, by snapping up an APO triplet but then you’ll run into cooldown issues, both for the glass and for your bank balance.

There is another version of this scope with a 102mm objective that is just as good a performer, producing better astrophotography images and supplying more detailed planetary images for a little over R4,000 more. You’ll have to balance the increased light-gathering capability with the reduction in portability and the increased mounting weight.

But choosing even this telescope should be a considered choice. There’s a lot of setup involved and you’ll spend at least as much as you pay for the tube on mounting it on a tripod and outfitting it with accessories. That’s far less of a problem if you’ve already got the gear for another setup, making the SV503 80mm a cost-effective choice. But if you’re starting from scratch, give real thought to why you want a telescope. If you’re just keen on some stars and have the budget, you won’t be sorry but bear in mind that many ‘scopes sit neglected in garages. If you’re planning to take photographs at some point, this is an excellent entry point. And if you’re an experienced observer, you probably already know where this would fit into your use-case lineup.