Red/green Dot Sight on a Superzoom for Bird Photography

2018-02-17 I bought a Panasonic DMC-FZ1000 camera w 1" chip and a measly 16x zoom, thinking that maybe the picture quality could compensate for the 16x by making images more 'croppable'. In a way it was correct but unfortunately not enough. Photographing birds was still hard. On the other hand, the camera is extremely fast, sturdy and has a fully-articulated LCD which is a fantastic feature and an extremly high quality viewfinder. It's by far the best camera I've owned.

So: I had to buy another one with 60x zoom för the birds... This time I ended up with a Panasonic FZ-82. From Deal Extreme in China i bought a red/green spot sight for practically nothing and made a very simple dovetail rail which fits in the external flash mount. I've tried the Olympus red dot sight (sold separately) but it's totally inadequate, it's moving in the mount at the slightest touch which results in you recalibrating time and time again. It's a good idea and a worthless application of that idea. The one I use now is fixed and keeps in place if I am reasonable careful. A world of difference!
Possible sources to cheap red/green dot sights are for example
https://www.dx.com or https://www.alibaba.com.
NOTE: green dots are more effective in daylight!

FZ-82 doesn't have the articulated LCD (which sucks), but is of no importance since I'm using the red dot sight. The viewfinder is not good in spite of the 0.2 inch, 1.17 million dot chip. Compared to the FZ1000 it's worthless and this IS a drawback when not taking pictures of birds. It works, though. It also have 4k UHD video at 25 or 30fps, which I don't use much. I could use it because there is the possibility to grab single images of the same quality as the stills. I think I will explore this option later [correction at the end of this]. The camera is much slower to use but, it works.

What I like best is to shoot flying birds. Nothing can compete with a dot sight in that context.

All in all, this combination of red dot sight and 60x zoom is very good when light is good. In weak light it's the same ol' story as with all other 1/2.3-type sensors, grainy pictures and long exposure times. It was worth the money and I really can recommend the Chinese red/green dot sight combination!

Correction 20210904: 

Using 4k video, images can be extracted from the stream, no problem. The image size is not the same as the normal stills, they are smaller. When taking photos of fast moving things, it's still an option to consider.