Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Optics So What's the Diff?

This.

Anyone is welcome to use what they wish. If shooting to see if you're on the pie plate once a year and hunting with a short walk to a stand to shoot a deer at 75-100 yards is all you need, you're probably not missing much.

Shooting 100 rounds...or even 30 rounds....a couple of days a week, dialing adjustments from 100 to 500 yards, and comparing results, differences start to become obvious. When checking zero over a 4 month hunting season, usually hunting 2 days a week, some hunts being a short walk and some being a long ATV ride followed by a long hike, and the zero isn't where it was the last time you shot...again....differences start to become obvious.

Edited to add - aside from reliability, there are optical and user characteristic differences in scopes. Some of the higher $ scopes aren't as view friendly as some of the plain jane low $ scopes.

Shaman,

Today I replaced the March 2.5-25X52 with the Bushnell 6500 Elite 4 1/2-30X50 to verify groups. This scope is trusted. One brass was tight going in so I will shoot again on Monday.

This is beginning to make quite a bit more sense. Yes, I am a hunter that shoots and not the other way around. Now that I'm retired, I may make more of an effort to shoot, but it will never be at a high volume.

Thanks.

Good post.

This right here.

aside from reliability, there are optical and user characteristic differences in scopes. Some of the higher $ scopes aren't as view friendly as some of the plain jane low $ scopes.

What’s become paramount for me are accurate, repeatable adjustments. It’s been a regular optical Chinese firedrill around here of late, and those good mechanics make swapping optics in and out much easier, saving time and ammo. Ditto for mounts, and like scopes, there are good ones at various levels, from the mid-level Warn Mountain Tech to the very inexpensive SWFAs that I discovered as part of a Black Friday package deal.

Pouring over specs helps, but there’s no real substitute for actually mounting and using an optic on your gun. Plenty of good ideas have gone up in smoke after putting them in practice. Sometimes you have to kiss a few frogs to find what works.

The frogs end up in the classifieds……

They are just trying to emulate the big stick character. Base life forms think its cool. It's completely transparent and unoriginal, unfortunately that's all they have going on. Funny enough, way back, when BCR and Need One (Sonny) where around, stick was an interesting and knowledgeable fella. Few know that! Still has good info, delivery just sucks now! The copy cats have nothing, not even an original personality!

My optical demands are shifting as I age out (70 in a couple months), as are my hunting protocols. Anymore I don't make a concerted effort to get into my "spot" half an hour to an hour before sunup. If that costs me a deer, then so be it - I don't care. Ditto with stumbling out of the woods after dark. The set-and-forget Leupolds I have on my dwindling battery of dedicated deer rifles suit me just fine in the forests that I hunt. I suspect there are quite a few other brands in that mid-price range that would work as well or better. Again, I don't care.

My optical demands are quite different in another respect: paper punching with vintage target rifles, usually 100+ year old single shots. 10-20x Unertls and the like serve me well for that. In that game I am most particular. (And yeah, BSA, a 20x Unertl or Lyman Targetspot allows me to quarter that tiny black diamond quite nicely.)

What bothers me most of all though is difficulty in using aperture sights. Coupled with an excellent binocular (Leica Duovid in my case) I've never felt undergunned with a rifle equipped with a receiver or a tang sight. (So many classic rifles suffer from having their ergonomics disrupted by attaching a big hunk of glass on top of them.) That changed in the recent past with the onset of a cataract in my "shooting eye" and put me squarely in the "scope it if you want to shoot it" camp. That shall change starting tomorrow when I submit myself to the ministrations of a very competent surgeon, after enduring six months of scheduling snafu's. The goal is to get back in the peep sight game, and the rifle du jour for this year's hunting shall be a very accurate original 1929-vintage M1903 Springfield NRA Sporter - with a Lyman 48 receiver sight and nary a scope.

A lot of wisdom in this post.

Peeps are back on for me since I got “real” glasses last Winter after futzing around with corrective safety lenses for a good while. It’s possible to get the right correction by trial and error, but getting it in the right spot is very important too, and that requires the help of an expert and their gear. I ponied up for some Decots for clays, and it’s worth every penny. I can use those for rifle work too.

My distance vision is 20/35, and passed my driver’s eye test without the glasses. Up close, not so much.

Good luck with the knife work🤞🏻

True.

If it's not reliable, it really doesn't matter how good the user characteristics are. If it's reliable with poor user characteristics, it's usable but irksome. The only way to really know is to put it to use.

I switched USPSA divisions a few years back to CO and was having trouble with the dot. The doc let me bring in my dot and we fine-tuned it beyond a normal eye exam and got my dot clear for the first time. Fortunately my doc is a hunter and understood exactly how important it was to me.

I hunt where you often have to look into deep shadows on the edge of forest and into the bottom of canyons at dawn and dusk and I've found the limits of several scopes are pretty disappointing. An older Leupold 3-9 I had on a rifle wasn't able to pick up a big four point I spotted in a deep shadow with my binos right at dusk. I put down the binos and brought up my rifle and I couldn't see the deer at all... I've had similar instances with other scopes also which led me to buying better scopes for this purpose. Some turned out to be better than others. The Bausch & Lomb and later Bushnell Elites have been some of my favorite scopes for this . I'm way too cheap to spend the big bucks on some of the scopes guys on this site talk about often like Swarovski, Night Force, and the Leupold VX5, VX6, etc... so I can't speak to them . About my limit on scopes has always been in the $700 range and they have worked fine for me in just about all conditions.

One thing I look for in scopes that maybe not all look for is- living in Oregon it rains a lot and snows often during elk season and occasionally during deer season. I look for a scope with good coatings, but I especially look for scope that will survive getting drenched and still working like it is supposed to. The Rainguard coatings that the Bushnell Elite scopes use works great to keep the lenses clear in this regard in my experience and they don't leak . Lesser scopes haven't always been reliable in this regard.

This is very true, and I have posted similar comments before. The reason I have not commented on this thread so far is because this is "Hunting Optics," and as was stated, when you only take a few shots at fairly close range, you may not ever need or understand the capabilities of a higher optics and thus not be able to answer the question "What's the diff?"

I'm one of those guys who will send about 70 rounds downrange to 1000 yards in competition in a single day. This weekend, I loaded the bulk of the ammo I need for the coming Nationals in Phoenix in October. I need a minimum of 404 rounds for 6 days of shooting at 600 and 1000 yards.

I will just address one aspect, image quality or IQ. The IQ of a scope is measured by brightness, clarity (resolution) and color fidelity. Usually, color fidelity is desired most by birdwatchers and they want their optics to have a high degree of color fidelity, whereas hunters are usually less concerned about that. However, in competition, color fidelity along with resolution and brightness go a long way to reduce eye fatigue during the long use of the riflescope. Some people use their high-end binoculars and/or spotting scopes much more compared to the riflescope. They only use the latter as an aiming device. In competition, we use the riflescope as an observation device as well as an aiming device. I could be looking through my riflescope for a long time before taking the shot and I will be back on the riflescope soon after, again for what may be a long period.

If the riflescope has a low IQ, it will strain your eye trying to discern the target or the conditions. If you don't like looking through the riflescope and you much rather look through the spotting scope because it has a better IQ, you are experiencing the difference. This gets even worse when the conditions are bad, such as in the case with heavy mirage. If your riflescope can't handle the mirage and you are forced to dial down the magnification, you are being let down by the difference. Extend that for 70 rounds a day, all recorded and scored, you start to appreciate high-end optics.