Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Optics Nikon 3-9x40 BDC Quality?

Cabela's is blowing these out at $90. Anyone have any experience with them good or bad? Thinking of picking one up for the AR15 I'm building for my nephew. Not a huge fan of that reticle but for that price he can live with it. His dad has that reticle on his deer rifle so they would be used to it. I looked through one at the store and it seemed OK but curious if anyone had long term experience with this specific model.

http://www.cabelas.com/product/NIKO...hm7PDt098eY8aAjYF8P8HAQ&gclsrc=aw.ds

I had one on my 7-08 for a while. The glass was pretty good, but the reticle drove me nuts. I got rid of it because the dang BDC dots got in the way of aiming at animals, which is probably the exact opposite of what a BDC was meant to do.

My thoughts too.

+3, the reticle is a deal breaker for me.
Must be for many others as well since that is the model that is usually on sale/clearance.

Yeah, I don't like the reticle either, but I think all Nikon BDC's have a similar one. On this one though, the circles seemed bigger and closer together than the one on my brother's Monarch. I'll let the kid decide though cuz the glass is pretty decent for the price.

Buy the 99.00 minox from doug better glass and reticle

Your link is Cabela's Canada, so pricing and the model are not
listed correctly.

Maybe you can try again.

Ever notice how many refurbished Nikon's you see listed?

This. Much better glass.

For some un known reason, Nikon is putting their gawd awful
BDC reticel in a lot of scopes.
Lots of places are selling the Nikon BDC scopes for less than the regular duel X, and that tells us just how un popular it is.

Agree with others, the reticle sucks. Monarch series seem to be nice scopes, the Prostaff..not so much.

Lots of refurbed Nikon products and had some sketchy warranty stuff go on with Nikon as well.

Also agree with the Minox for price point at Cameraland. ( At least I hope I'm right about that, I just ordered one...)

How do you figure that? This is the link to the Canada site. Notice the little maple leaf next to the name?
http://www.cabelas.ca/category/riflescopes/1473?brand=NIKON
That scope isn't on sale in CA

Maybe you can try again.

I saw the mapleleaf at the top, and thought it was the
CA website.
My mistake.

No worries. I hadn't had a Snickers bar. Didn't mean to be snarky.

This was my experience also. Decent glass for the price, but I found myself involuntarily focusing on the reticle instead of the target. Not too bad a problem when shooting at paper, but not too good when shooting at deer.

Do you actually know why or just prefer to take a shot at Nikon?

Nikon has a strict policy regarding returns. You can go to your local retail store, buy one, get to the door and decide you really shouldn't have spent that $$. So you walk back to customer service and return it. The scope has never been opened or out of the box, but per policy, it has to go back to Nikon. They do not allow returned/exchanged goods to be resold by stores. So it goes back.

Then, they give it a thorough diagnostics check, re-box it and then sell it as a refurb, even though -- technically -- it is brand new.

As an aside, some stores have things like a 30-day no-questions-asked return policy. Cheapskates -- some whom have bragged about it on the web -- buy a scope at the beginning of deer season, get their deer, return them and then get their money back. Hence, you get refurbs with handling and occasionally ring marks.

We weren't aware of this policy where I worked. If a Nikon scope was returned, wasn't defective and didn't have marks on it, it was put back in inventory. If it wasn't defective but had mounting marks, it was sold at a reduced price in the Bargain Cave.

Then it's possible you sell used scopes as new???

Just because a scope has no marks doesn't mean it hasn't been mounted and used. I recently sold one of my Conquest scopes that had been in and out of rings at least a dozen times. But it did not have a mark anywhere on it and could have passed as new. And the glass was still factory-perfect and pristine. But it certainly wasn't new, despite its appearance.

This would explain why an acquaintance of mine was so unhappy with his "new" Bushnell a few years ago. It had scratches on the elevation cap and a fingerprint on the objective lens. But the store did exchange it for another -- no questions asked.

It is possible.