safariman,
I won't go into the brands because both Eileen and I are apparently bad-scope magnets. I constantly have to tell scope manufacturers that if they want to upgrade their quality control, they should just pick any scope at random and send it to me--especially if it's the first one they've ever sent.
The same thing happened to Eileen when she was the optics columnist for the two years the NRA published a women's magazine. She had six defective scopes.
I will say that only one of the three that went bonkers in Africa was a Leupold--and that turned out to be due to the rings being tightened too much. The owner of the custom rifle company that built Eileen's rifle turned out to be a "farmer tight" guy. On the hunt Eileen replaced the 2.5-8x with a 1.5-5x Leupold I'd brought along as a spare, and as she finished up the same guy told her to "now, really tighten those screws." She refused, and he tried to take the screwdriver away from her. She almost stabbed him with it.
When we got home, she sent the 2.5-8x to Leupold, and they couldn't find anything wrong with it. It's worked fine ever since on more than one rifle. It may be worth noting that the guy who tried to take her screwdriver away claimed that most Leupolds are "bad out of the box."
The other two scopes were a high-priced Euro-scope and a top-notch Japanese-made brand.
