My EP-5 arrived Friday. I had ordered the evening of December 21. I have followed the Arken threads, discounted both the hype and the doomers/nay-sayers, and bought based on specs, warranty, and price.
I hit the range yesterday. Personally, I'd say this is a hell of a lot of scope for $550, including mount, caps, throw lever, etc.
It isn't a $2K scope for $550. It isn't even a $1100 scope for $550. But it's an awesome scope if your budget is $550.
So far I haven't seen anything that disappoints or surprises me. The glass seems fantastic to my eye, even at 25X magnification--but I don't own any high-end glass, the best scope I have owned previously was the Primary Arms GLX 6-24--which I also think is an excellent scope at the price point I bought it at--$550. When I sighted in at 25 yards I just shot once, milled the correction, dialed, and nailed it. 2 shot zero. Went to the 100, figured calculated the drop from a 25 yard zero, and was within 3 clicks.
For the haters--yes, the scope does have fails. My parallax did not adjust/focus to 25 yards at 25X magnification. Looks like it missed by a couple yards. Oh well. At 200 and 300 yards my parallax does not align with the yardage indicated. It is actually surprisingly far off, not even close--but I don't particularly care about that. The focus coincides with the correct parallax adjustment--good enough for my purposes. The illumination is not daylight bright (again--oh well)--but there are 3 workable settings at dusk. Setting 4 is about perfect, and I liked that the illumination switched off between the illumination intensity settings.
I will be doing a box test at some point this week, and I will update.
All in all, so far so good, and I'm glad Arken got into the scope business.