Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Optics Question for newer Weaver Grand Slam owners

A $1400 weaver grand slam? 🙄

That’s MSRP...they didn’t actually sell for that. Same as a lot of optics on the market with inflated retail prices.

You ever get a chance to do anymore testing?

Unfortunately, no. I wanted to print some better images for evaluation and my HP printer was giving me fits. I got sick of it and now I have an Epson EcoTank printer that seems to be light years better and I've printed some images to look at...just in time for this month's Ice Age. I'm not sure about this, but it seems to me that bright sunlight would be best for this kind of stuff, and that's something we're not getting anytime soon.

So, do you think I am right about the sunlight?

Doesn’t matter. I can see it regardless of sunlight. Best colors are white on black or vice versa.

I'll give it a shot Saturday morning. It's colder than a witch's tit in a brass bra here lately and I haven't been acclimated to cold weather for a long time now, but I'll brave it anyway...while I'm at it I'll compare a Big Sky 3.5-10x, and 3-12x Grand Slam, a 5-20x Grand Slam, a 4-16x Grand Slam, and a 3-15x Super Slam I just acquired.

Seawood...sorry to have kept you waiting so long.

I set up a black & white ring image about 45 yards away from a place I could set a rifle rest. I checked for this using my 5-20x Grand Slam. I definitely saw the "blue blur" at the edges at 20x, and it diminished to *just about gone when I zoomed down to about 14x.

I think your scope is performing at typical optical performance.

I'm going to evaluate a few more scopes for this in a few minutes.

I just finished looking at a number of scopes. ALL of them showed purple or blue color distortion at maximum zoom.

What I found was that as zoom was decreased, the effect would diminish and generally disappear at some lower magnification point. One scope was without parallax adjustment, a BIg Sky 3.5-10x and the image was not at all clearly focused, but I could see the aberration.

I also found that eye position had a lot to do with the color aberration. With perfect eye position in the eyebox the effect was minimized. Aberration would disappear completely, or nearly so, as zoom approached minimum.

Scopes I checked:

Weaver Grand Slam 3-12 (2 of these)
Weaver Grand Slam 4-16x
Weaver Grand Slam 5-20x
Weaver Super Slam 3-15x
Tract Response 4-16x
Sightron Big Sky 3.5-10x
Nightforce SHV 4-14x

Yup. Even the Nightforce is subject to color aberration. I'm glad I am not so picky that I find this all unacceptable because I can't afford to be so choosy.

I think I now understand what was going on with a SWFA 20x I had a couple of years ago (which I traded in on a 10x, which I found very usable but just not too useful for me and was sold here in the classifieds just this morning). I think I had red dots up as targets, and they would appear to be green. Or they were blue and appeared to be orange---or some such weird crap. Memory fails me, but all I knew was that I could not get behind that scope and use it to save my life. THAT I cannot abide.

Thanks for the great feedback, RR. At least now I know my scope isn’t defective. I was out trying to reduce the local coyote population in the far Northeast today and the CA was real bad with the snow and dark forest background. The fringing has no negative effect on my ability to hit targets...or as was the case today, not even see any targets. LOL. I do find it odd that this new Grand Slam is the only one in my collection of Weaver scopes that exhibits this trait. All of my older high powered Classics and Grand Slams show little to no CA....just the newer generation Weaver.

And yes, eye position has quite an effect on how much fringing is seen....the more off-center, the worse it is.

Thanks again, appreciate the time you took to help me out!

Anytime, sir. I may not always get it right, but I'm always willing to try to help. I'm here to learn much more than to inform...and I know I'm in the right place for that.