Muggles' Guide to Harry Potter/Magic/Omnioculars

Muggles' Guide to Harry Potter - Magic
Omnioculars
Type	Magical device
Features	Distance vision
First Appearance	Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Overview

Like Muggle binoculars, omnioculars are designed to allow the viewing of distant events, most especially sporting events.

Extended Description

Being magical, Omnioculars have additional capabilities, such as instant replay, slow motion, and annotation. Watching the Quidditch World Cup, Harry puts his Omnioculars into slow-motion replay, and sees the action of the game in slow motion, complete with labels for the various maneuvers that the players are carrying out. Harry later comments that he never really understood the Wronsky feint, a technique used by Seekers, until he had seen it at the World Cup; quite possibly he had also used the Omnioculars to slow it down and analyze the moves.

Omnioculars become one of the few points of tension between Harry and Ron. They are expensive, at 10 Galleons apiece, and Harry immediately buys a set for Ron as well as one for himself. Ron is dismayed at this excess of generosity, and is only mollified by Harry's telling him not to expect anything for Christmas for the next ten years or so. The Irish team mascots, Leprechauns, drop gold on the audience at the start of the game, and Ron collects a great lot of it, giving it all to Harry and saying that makes them even. Several months later, Hagrid is teaching a lesson on Nifflers, which hunt for shiny objects, including gold; he says that what he has buried is Leprechaun gold, and it will vanish in a few hours. Thinking about this after class, Ron wonders why Harry had not told him that the gold he had given Harry for the omnioculars had vanished. Harry says that he had not noticed. Dejected, Ron wonders what it would be like to be so rich that he wouldn't even notice when a great lot of gold simply vanished.

Analysis

Omnioculars are a rather amazingly useful device, with their ability to magnify and play back images. One rather wonders why they appear only at the Quidditch World Cup and then are forgotten.

Questions

1. In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Hermione points out to Harry that if he doesn't watch things at normal speed, he is going to miss things. Would you prefer to see events happening in real time, or slow them down to better understand them even if it means being behind the times?