Agreed! Hell, I might check into a Swarovski!
After using a number of really good scope and at least like like number of lower end scopes on my rifles and testing almost all of the offerings for crossbows, here's they way it shakes out for me.
What I need out of a crossbow scope scope is not just good enough to show me a deer because with an arrow you have to target the internal organ(s). Even when you are just trying to double lung Bambi, you are still working close enough to the shoulder bones that you need to be sure to avoid them, you still want both lungs well hit and you still want to avoid the shoulder bones on the off side to be sure you get two holes in Bambi to make for the best chance at a good blood trail. Put the shot a little far back on a deer angled toward you and you might well get a small part of one lung only and then exit out through the diaphragm and through the abdominal cavity on the way out. So
that exit wound may well be plugged completely by the omentum which is why that organ is there. It's no secret that deer love acorns. It's no secret that oaks, and in particular red oaks hold their leaves and keep a heavy canopy through deer season. Because of their growth habit of sparse canopy down low, oaks leave a niche for bush like hazel, buckthorn and sumac under them. That can make for a very dark ground floor. I do not need a lot of magnification. Because the string is held under very high poundage even with compound crossbows,
just the noise of the trigger releasing is louder than a lot of vertical bows total noise output for the entire shot. If Bambi can jump the string at 20-30 yards with my No Cam which is as quiet as any bow I shoot alongside, it's unreasonable to believe they cannot manage the same with a 400 FPS crossbow.. So, range doesn't change for me at all with the crossbow even though I can be far more accurate and carry more power much further with the crossbow.
Most crossbow scopes are just rebadged low end rifle scopes with poor to completely unacceptable low light performance. That's the one most critical requirement for me. Second is a decent reticle that shows me my target rather than obscures it with circles or heavy crosshairs or illumination that swamps out the target.. Very clear edge to edge image and good depth of field are very important to seeing clearly the angle of the body. If a scope under 4x has insufficient field of view there is no way that scope merits consideration for any use.
For my purposes, I don't need more than 4x magnification out of a crossbow scope. For the most part 2 1/2 or 3x is plenty. Weight is just not a consideration, I am not going to carry it a lot, nor is snap shooting a likelihood.
I have a VX-3 Leupold 1-4x20 that meets all the requirements but for the low light performance which is abysmal compared to the Duralyt, so, a quality scope alone just isn't enough for this job.
