Here we go! I would like to think this is one of the first reviews of the XTR Pro from someone that is not part of team Burris. We all know how people like to think those opinions are skewed. I have no affiliation with the company other than living within 30 minutes of their facility. The scope was purchased by me from a Burris dealer, with my own money. Let’s gets into it.
I will start this off by saying the scope I purchased was rumored to be for use by a sponsored shooter and was not supposed to be sold to the public. I cannot confirm this in any way but it may account for a couple of small things below. This is what I was told by a fellow member here. Other stock orders are shipping out right now so who knows.
Unboxing:
It’s a box with a scope in it. Exciting, huh. Nice foam as usual, race turret installed, sun shade, normal black turret, manual, and Allen key for the windage turret. Scope comes with Burris flip caps on it that are very similar to Butler Creek. Nothing fancy but they work. I personally don’t use them except to hold an IDTS lens. I was hoping a throw lever would be in the box but it wasn’t. No battery either. These are the areas of debate mentioned above. They might come with the lever, no real clear answer yet, but customer service said they are out of stock right now. They said they will send me one as soon as they come in. I’m happy with that. If the lever is indeed not included, I personally would rather have the lever over caps. The battery is not an issue, I use illumination once a year, maybe. I did take one out of another scope to play with the different colors, I like the green lol.
First impressions:
The first thing I noticed is the texture is a little less smooth than some other scopes. Not rough, but less smooth. Like it’s almost a spayed coating versus being anodized, and it’s more matte. Turrets feel really nice, mag ring moves smoothly, parallax is smooth as well. The sun shade appears to be the same color lol. It is very fine threaded so it takes a moment to screw on. The capped windage turret is smaller so this could be good or bad for some. I hold wind now so I like it. One slightly odd thing I noticed while playing with the elevation turret. The marks would line up till around 2 mils and start being off slightly till you made it back around to zero, then the same thing on the next revolution. Not off much, like .05 mil max, but off none the less. It seemed like the the engraving was off but it was on all 3 elevation turrets. I could offset zero slightly and get them to line up in the 5+ mil range but off down low. I chalked it up to being early production and would get it checked out later. Turns out the issues completely went away when I zeroed my rifle. It’s a mystery now. I have 19.1 mils of travel up and every mark is dead on. Zeroing the turret was fast and easy. Open lever, pull turret, push back on at zero, and close the lever. Zero stop is already set. The SCR2 looked really nice and very usable. The red color on the scope could be a hot topic of debate, think vortex brown, more on that in a bit.
Actual competition use:
Just a one day comp today, roughly 80 rifle rounds from 180 yards out to 1475 yards. Weather was rough. Started out 34ish degrees with 10-12mph wind at 9-10 o’clock and light snow. It went down hill from there with temps dropping into the upper 20s and winds 18 with gusts of 25mph in the afternoon. The scope ran like a champ all day long. The quick release race dial is by far one of my favorite things. I can place my rifle down, pop off the turret, and mark target settings and wind holds in a matter of a couple minutes. I was running a wrist play holder for my dope but it has been retired. The stages are so much faster when you don’t have to look down to get your dope and then line up those tiny marks. Just crank it over to the mark you made and run it! Like I mentioned, I hold wind so it’s always right there for the current target at a glance. It made running near to far target strings multiple times SO much easier. My “tear offs” experiment from a few posts up worked extremely well. The only issues with the whole thing all day is my sharpie started freezing up, not joking lol. I am a huge fan of this turret. I dialed wind a couple of times and all seemed to work as it should. Parallax was great, just set it for a middle value in the string of fire and forget about it till the next stage. The SCR2 worked very well, I ran around 16x-20x most of the day and 30x on a KYL stage. The holdover marks were not too large yet easy to find and decipher. The center cross basically turns into a dot at 16x. Not a cluttered reticle and more open in my opinion. Only issue all day was on one of the longer stages when trying to hold 4-5 mils of wind, yes it was that kind of day, and the little sizing/ranging marks made it a little confusing. This could’ve been easily corrected by just pre-dialing in some windage to move it away from that area. As mentioned, it was cold enough that my sharpie was trying to stop working, my wind meter did stop working, and I was actually worried my phone was going to shut down. The turrets, parallax, and mag ring never changed. All stayed smooth and consistent and the clicks felt great. I was not disappointed in any area with this scope.
The last match I shot was last week. The last match I shot before that one was roughly 10 years ago. Not much in the way of long range shooting between those two matches. Last week was a solid middle of the pack finish at 13th of 29. This week I improved that with a 3RD PLACE out of 17 and only 3.5 points behind 1st!!! I seriously credit that to the race dial and reticle. It’s so nice to be able to turn part of your brain off and just worry about running the rifle.
Now to the red color. I get what Burris is doing, it’s marketing. It’s their color, it stands out, there is no doubt it’s an XTR Pro if you see it in a picture. It’s probably not my first choice but it’s growing on me. The scope was built for competition use, no worries about being spotted by the enemy, might as well have fun with it. I am 100% certain that at no point today did the red color cause me to miss a shot.
Lastly we have comparison:
After the match I had a chance to compare the XTR Pro to a Kahles 624 gen3 that belongs to
@Baron85. Quick side note, he bested me by 1.5 points to take 2nd place today, great shooting and congrats! We placed both rifles side by side and compared at various targets across the range. We both came to the same conclusion that the Burris had a slight edge over the Kahles. To me it was possibly in contrast but it just looked a tick better. It was not an earth shattering amount by any stretch but still better to me. I feel that it could easily swing either way depending on who was looking through them. Both are very much in the same league in my opinion. Hopefully I can compare with other high end glass in the near future.
To sum it all up. It was a great chance to really run the scope and it passed with flying colors. I can’t wait to get it back out and do it some more. Burris really put some great features on this scope and they are definitely looking to make a bigger name for themselves in the competition scene.
