Rifle Scopes Chromatic Aberration

[hypno02]

I’m really starting to wonder how all you douchers that constantly bitch about CA ever even impact targets.

What do you people do when you get a rock chip in the lower 1/8 of your windshield? Stare at it the whole way to your destination then bitch about it to all your friends that don’t want to hear about it?

(Spoiler alert—you still made it from A—>B)

You guys make Burris XTR2’s sound like they were built by Tasco in the 1980’s with lenses sprayed with gray spray paint as a optical coating.

Durability>Reliability>Good Glass>Features>Factory Support>Great Glass.

Change my mind.

 

[Baner]

Well some scopes have extreme CA, can mask bullet holes in paper and make it extremely difficult to mil targets.

Not fun losing points because your optics isn't up to the task.

But if you can live with shity optics, go ahead.

 

[hypno02]

I’m not living with shitty optics—believe me.

What scopes are you suggesting that have such horrible CA that mask bullet holes in paper and make it hard to mil targets?

 

[Mordamer]

Prepare to be flamed. I agree with the OP. I mentioned before on this site how there are a bunch of scope snowflakes and I got flamed. I had a Kahles 624i that had very visible CA. I shot incredibly well with it and I am convinced that the CA never cost me a single miss. Of course the Nightforce ATACR I am running now has no visible CA to my eyes.

 

[Sako man]

Prepare to be flamed. I agree with the OP. I mentioned before on this site how there are a bunch of scope snowflakes and I got flamed. I had a Kahles 624i that had very visible CA. I shot incredibly well with it and I am convinced that the CA never cost me a single miss. Of course the Nightforce ATACR I am running now has no visible CA to my eyes.

Haha, yeah the OP is coming in hot! I had a first gen 624i as well and the thing had all the color of the rainbow, I so wanted to love it but for the money I put out there were much better optics available. Why live with it when it's blurred up my sight picture? That said the thing tracked great and I could still shoot with it. Really bottom line is if this was the end of the world and you had what you had you either make it work or your dead, now that's extreme but you get my point.

 

[Vargmat]

Around here the largest long range rifle comps is called "Field Shooting". All targets are set at unknown distance, no LRF:s are allowed. So you use the reticle to Mil each target and this is where CA causes a problem. This is also the only reason to why I sold my Razor G2 and got a PM2. With high contrast targets you have no real idea on where the actual target starts and ends, when a scope has a lot of CA. It was very apparent in my results. My measurements went from as bad as +/- 35-40 meters to often below +/-10 meters after I changed scopes. Sometimes I am down to +/- 1 meter and that I something I never managed with the Razor.

If you shoot known distance targets, it won't matter as much. Keep your Kahles and Razors and Burris scopes for the square ranges or the times where the LRFs does the job for you...

 

[Baner]

Well some scopes have extreme CA, can mask bullet holes in paper and make it extremely difficult to mil targets.

Not fun losing points because your optics isn't up to the task.

But if you can live with shity optics, go ahead.

All scopes with CA makes it harder than it need's to be.

Why pay 2k$+ for a scope with CA when you can get one without it for the same cash?.

 

[Dthomas3523]

Probably the same douchers that make threads about how something doesn’t affect things, when the thing he’s complaining about doesn’t affect him? ?‍

 

[Mooncake]

Even if CA just annoys you why live with it when you don’t have to?

 

[CuTm]

i understand what you’re saying . Luckily scopes are so great now, along with really everything, we can complain about it all. It’s sweet. We’re sensitive

 

[roamin]

CA can be intentionally induced in almost any scope by moving the eye towards the edge of the eyebox the further towrads the edge of the eye box the eye is moved the more the CA that's induced. Usually placing the eye high in the eyebox induces the most CA. Consequently scopes with the largest eyebox typically have the most CA. Some manufacturers mask or limit the size of the eyebox internally to prevent the user from noticing CA but I'd rather they didn't as a usable but less than ideal image is better than no image coming from the masked area of the eyebox. Because masks are an internal ring that reduces the internal surface area of the image they present manufacturers with a choice between limiting FOV or limiting magnification and IMO they also seem to reduce low light transmission.

All scopes have CA each and every one them its just a matter of how much, does the manufacture use a mask, and does the mask prevent the user from misaligning their eye enough to reveal CA before it becomes noticeable. It's just the trade off that manufacturers face.

 

[steve123]

Those miscreant douchenozzles, lol.

Thankfully my eyes don't hardly pick up CA!

Just yesterday, shooting our 22's, the two of us were using my SWFA 3-15 on 15x, and a friends Athlon Argos BTR 6-24, set on 16x, at 421Y, on a black steel turkey silhouette. Those little 40 grainers don't leave much of a splat! Both of us couldn't see the hits looking through the SWFA, but could easily make them out with the Argos. Just pointing out that if you can't see where on the steel you hit, then you can't correct to center. Or if you can't see where exactly you missed in the dirt, then you can't measure and adjust accordingly. I keep that SWFA for one major reason, it's because it has 33 mils of elevation travel, well and it's paid for. I'm glad we had the Argos right then.

 

[Vargmat]

CA can be intentionally induced in almost any scope by moving the eye towards the edge of the eyebox the further towrads the edge of the eye box the eye is moved the more the CA that's induced. Usually placing the eye high in the eyebox induces the most CA. Consequently scopes with the largest eyebox typically have the most CA. Some manufacturers mask or limit the size of the eyebox internally to prevent the user from noticing CA but I'd rather they didn't as a usable but less than ideal image is better than no image coming from the masked area of the eyebox. Because masks are an internal ring that reduces the internal surface area of the image they present manufacturers with a choice between limiting FOV or limiting magnification and IMO they also seem to reduce low light transmission.

All scopes have CA each and every one them its just a matter of how much, does the manufacture use a mask, and does the mask prevent the user from misaligning their eye enough to reveal CA before it becomes noticeable. It's just the trade off that manufacturers face.

You have obviously never looked through a Hensoldt scope. Biggest eyebox I know of and amazing glass. No CA what so ever.

 

[samnev]

Maybe I'm partially CA blind. I have 1 Burris XTRII 4-20X50 and 2 5-25X50 scores with SCR reticles and have not noticed any CA that would interfere on any way with seeing hoLes in paper targets. As a matter of fact I have noticed it to any degree on any of the 3 scopes. I usually use all 3 between 12x an 18X on most occasions. Perhaps it occurs on lower magnification which I rarelY use. Just my experience.

 

[Deleted member 113831]

I have a Burris XTR 2 3-15x. I have been shooting out to 2400 yards with it. According to some on here, that is an impossibility.

 

[Fig]

While I applaud you smacking the beehive , it's purely for entertainment. Arguing about this shit is as 100% pointless as arguing about what wine tastes like.

This condition of being an unwashed cur, unable to discern the finer nuances of esoteric pleasures, living in a dirty hovel, and scratching an existence out of the earth permeates our whole dreary life unlike our betters who appreciate the finest things life has to offer, and they certainly deserve it! Ask them!

Never will you swirl your wine and enjoy notes of nutmeg, cherry, and iambic pentameter in the nose. Never will you sip and taste citrus, envy, and morendo. To you every huge pull, straight off the bottle, tastes like communion, and is only to further addle your already addled mind.

You're a beer swilling peasant. Either embrace that reality, or pretend to taste all the shit that the fancy people can taste. You are not going to be one of them unless you pretend just as vehemently as they do. Only in the milieu of The Hide will you fine fancy people MFing $3000 scopes and claiming they're not usable for the kind of shooting they do.

IMHO...If you're going to taste all that shit in the wine, you better be NUMBERFUCKING ONE (at least top ten) and have a big old pile of trophies to prove just how good you can shoot and how great your eyes are to have CA affect you so much. My guess is aaaaaaah-no.

 

[EXTREMEPREJUDICE]

Well there's generally quite a few on the opposite side of the fence.............................waiting for them to show up..........

 

[Fig]

 

[Fig]

Well there's generally quite a few on the opposite side of the fence.............................waiting for them to show up..........

LOL already.

 

[hypno02]

Good conversation fellas! I just had to stir the pot. The ranging and bullet impact points are certainly legitimate I can appreciate those.

 

[Fig]

Yea, you can't mill anything if it looks slightly purple. I tried it once and that eye exploded.

 

[EXTREMEPREJUDICE]

You're exaggerating, I've milled slighlty purple chromatically distorted targets and my eye didn't explode....................on second thought though, maybe it was slightly magenta?

 

[FatBoy]

Only in the milieu of The Hide will you fine fancy people MFing $3000 scopes and claiming they're not usable for the kind of shooting they do.

@Fig,

SO true...

How do us Hoi Polloi get by.. fucking heathens.

 

[MarinePMI]

Well, a Prius can take you from point A to point B. That being said, I ain't driving no fucking Prius.

Enjoy your powder blue Prius brother, because a lot of us wouldn't be caught dead in one, even if it gets the job done.

Put another way, why in the fuck would I put up with CA if I don't have to?

As they used to say in the Corps "It's good to be hard, but not if it's just by being a rock."

 

[Rthur]

The fact that we even have this "argument" is testament to the quality of scopes/glass we are enjoying.

R

 

[Fig]

Sure. A Khales (appears to be what most people get bent out of shape about) is a Prius, but a NF is a Lamborghini. You need to work on your metaphors.

There's are a ton of detailie shit in my life I get bent out of shape about. I simply acknowledge that it's a thing with me and don't expect the rest of the world to feel exactly the same way, as some do here.

I'm a neat freak living with slobs. Not really. They probably have a normal amount of neatness, and I'm insane. I admit it. I don't argue about cleaning up and putting everything in it's place. Doing it takes 1/10th the energy of arguing about it, so I'm quite literally a janitor in my house. No complaints. I want it clean and neat, so I will make it so without further argument.

I don't expect everyone to agree with me, and I don't really care. It's funny to me that so many people do.

 

[MarinePMI]

Pretty sure the OP was talking about Burris XTR II's. Which I think garners a lot of controversy, since they have improved the glass over the years. The first ones were pretty bad with CA.

 

[roamin]

You have obviously never looked through a Hensoldt scope. Biggest eyebox I know of and amazing glass. No CA what so ever.

You bet I've looked though Hensoldt I also own several very high end scopes myself and I stand by what I've said.

 

[Dthomas3523]

@TheGerman

 

[Tunnuh]

The only thing this thread needs now is Phillip and Okra arguing IOR vs Tangent Theta. Happy thanksgiving.

 

[roamin]

But but but you haven't looked though my favorite brand of glass..........

Actually yes I have and I could induce CA in each and everyone of them they all have it. The difference is that most manufacturers mask the outter portion of the eyebox that CA becomes noticeable in. So now instead of a wider eyebox with an image with some CA present near the edges of the eyebox you have blackness in that portion of the eyebox. CA is very sensitive to eye alingment If you keep your eye aligned in the center of the eyebox even the 624i has zero CA. Or if you move your eye towards the edge of the eyebox particularly the high edge it will produce CA in any scope and it does produce CA in my ATACR, NXS and PMII all of which have significantly smaller eyeboxes than my 624i.

 

[5RWill]

It always seems opposite to me. People dislike that people dislike CA lol. Half the people that don’t like it including myself always make a disclaimer that it has no bearing on hitting the target. I expect it in a certain price point and expect it to be minimal if I’m paying top dollar for an optic.

I do thoroughly enjoy good glass though. And yeah scope function is more important but there is a level of expectation at every price point.

 

[CSTactical]

Let's not tell 2018 NRL Champion John Pynch about his K525i's CA...

 

[canezach]

I can guarantee those complaining about CA have never had a scope that uses Schott glass!!

/grabs popcorn
//watches from a distance

 

[MarinePMI]

I can guarantee those complaining about CA have never had a scope that uses Schott glass!!

/grabs popcorn
//watches from a distance

 

[Sako man]

They spray primer as an optical coating on the XTR2? That's terrible! No wonder...

 

[Deleted member 113831]

I've always found it odd how much more tolerant scope snobs are of tracking error than minute differences in glass.

 

[MarkLeupold]

I got one thing to say to you all...


QUIGLEY FORD QF520


In all seriousness, I have a Steiner T5Xi 3-15x50. CA is there when I pay attention to it. It's worse than many scopes, but I can't ever say that I distinctly remember seeing any CA at the last match I went to. Too many other things going through my head taking priority other than, "Hmm, that target edge looks slightly yellow/purple..."

 

[hypno02]

“I had a beautiful B&C elk in the crosshairs at 712yds. He was bugling like the proudest thing you’ve ever seen. Every hair on his body was standing on end as I could tell he was really feeling it at this point. I had a crisp clear view of all 17 points. A couple were broken off being he’s an obvious fighter. I knew he was a shooter.

That’s when I broke the shot.

Fuck I missed by 8ft with my $1000 vortex/Athlon because it’s a fragile piece of shit that doesn’t track. Shoulda picked up the lrhsi from gap for $750. Fuck I’m dumb”

^completely fabricated story showcasing how stupid glass quality can impact a purchasing decision.

 

[5RWill]

“I had a beautiful B&C elk in the crosshairs at 712yds. He was bugling like the proudest thing you’ve ever seen. Every hair on his body was standing on end as I could tell he was really feeling it at this point. I had a crisp clear view of all 17 points. A couple were broken off being he’s an obvious fighter. I knew he was a shooter.

That’s when I broke the shot.

Fuck I missed by 8ft with my $1000 vortex/Athlon because it’s a fragile piece of shit that doesn’t track. Shoulda picked up the lrhsi from gap for $750. Fuck I’m dumb”

^completely fabricated story showcasing how stupid glass quality can impact a purchasing decision.

That has happened with staples of the industry several times. Pick brand X and i'm sure you can find a story similar. Wasn't it just this month some guy with his 7-35 ATACR had it fail on a hunt and had to use a cheapo depot backup vortex? Pretty sure i read that thread here because he was ungodly pissed that he had to pay for shipping back to NF.

I see your point though and think it's valid LRHS has a great track record i'm not sure how it compares to the new PST but they're not incapable of fault. Case in point a buddy of mine just sent one back to Bushy and instead of waiting they offered him the same mag LRTS and he took it so it he didn't have to wait.

Having said that.. favoring reliability so much you can almost argue in favor of the snobbiest scopes on the market because they have a much lower failure rate than any of the CA plagued scopes people complain about. Outside of going with unproven lineups in favor of glass quality, yeah i'd pick a reputable scope with better glass over a reputable scope with worse glass every day of the week and twice on Sunday. But that's just me..

 

[TheGerman]

You all need to just go be poor somewhere else.

 

[winniethepooh]

You all need to just go be poor somewhere else.

This is worth reading the whole thread lol

 

[spife7980]

You all need to just go be poor somewhere else.

But Im only poor on here...

 

[supercorndogs]

You guys make Burris XTR2’s sound like they were built by Tasco in the 1980’s with lenses sprayed with gray spray paint as a optical coating.

Durability>Reliability>Good Glass>Features>Factory Support>Great Glass.

Change my mind.

Some of the early XTRIIs looked exactly like that. The newer ones, not so much.

 

[supercorndogs]

I am poor every where I go.......but I'm stayin.....

 

[bigdaddydmd]

But Im only poor because I'm on here...

Fixed it for ya. Lord knows this site is a terrible, terrible influence on the wallet. It was so much cheaper when a Leupold VX-1 with duplex was considered a good scope and you were a rich man if you had a VX-3.

 

[Fig]

When $2,500 scopes are “unusable” because of CA I don’t think funds or poverty are the issues. As matter of taste and preference I can understand it. What creates the entertainment is people who insist their preference and taste is what allows them to achieve impacts, or that there is a scientific basis for chromatic aberration shifting the image, as if it were mirage, so as to cause them to miss or that it makes observing the target in the reticle impossible.

The fact is that severe CA would annoy just about anyone. The amount present in high end scopes (or low end for that matter) is just enough to observe. I’ve never seen an image through a scope that has such bad CA I felt it would effect accuracy.

I shoot. I’m not a photographer. I’m not looking for this, I barely see it, and it doesn’t affect me. I would think a photographer would be totally sensitive to this, but as a marksman it’s a big MEH.

 

[davere]

I would think a photographer would be totally sensitive to this, but as a marksman it’s a big MEH.

It definitely annoys the fuck out of me... LOL. (photography is my day job), but CA isn't going to cause you to have problems hitting the target, unless it's so wildly out of control that it interferes with your ability to actually discern the target.

The problem with looking through amazing glass for a living is that suddenly, just "good" glass looks like total ass. That said... I paid more for my riflescope - a relatively simple lens system with some pretty precise adjustments - than I did for a pro-grade f/2.8 aperture 70-200 with image stabilization built in. The camera lens has a lot less magnification (at 200mm, it's somewhere around 4x, IIRC), and it zooms just lightly less (2.85x vs 4x), but it has a lot of precise electronics and motors in it. The camera lens controls CA like a madman compared to the scope - and my scope doesn't have bad CA by any stretch. For the price range, though, it does seem like the scope could control CA a little better.

All that said, I'm extremely demanding about optics, just because it's a large part of what I do on a regular basis. Most people don't even know about things that I pick up behind a lens, much less get bothered about them.

 

[roamin]

It definitely annoys the fuck out of me... LOL. (photography is my day job), but CA isn't going to cause you to have problems hitting the target, unless it's so wildly out of control that it interferes with your ability to actually discern the target.

The problem with looking through amazing glass for a living is that suddenly, just "good" glass looks like total ass. That said... I paid more for my riflescope - a relatively simple lens system with some pretty precise adjustments - than I did for a pro-grade f/2.8 aperture 70-200 with image stabilization built in. The camera lens has a lot less magnification (at 200mm, it's somewhere around 4x, IIRC), and it zooms just lightly less (2.85x vs 4x), but it has a lot of precise electronics and motors in it. The camera lens controls CA like a madman compared to the scope - and my scope doesn't have bad CA by any stretch. For the price range, though, it does seem like the scope could control CA a little better.

All that said, I'm extremely demanding about optics, just because it's a large part of what I do on a regular basis. Most people don't even know about things that I pick up behind a lens, much less get bothered about them.

I used to beat up the photography club in High School good times.

 

[CuTm]

I used to beat up the photography club in High School good times.

Doubt it