First of all, I run a large gun range, an on line retail store, a large shooting organization, and I shoot professionally in the PRS with mixed results based on whether my rifle will feed and fire ammunition properly. I am going to throw a few facts into this thread and I will likely get banned or the thread will be deleted but I am tired of things being thrown around as facts that are not. I sell IOR, Bushnell, and US Optics and while I personally prefer IOR for personal reasons, there are many good optics on the market today. I have owned 10 IOR scopes and shoot them in the PRS series now. I have had zero issues with any of them. Now I am going to provide the facts as I understand them about a few things.
1. Val: Val defected from communist Romania as a member of the Romanian bobsled team during the Olympics. I believe 1984 was the year. He lived in a refuge camp in Italy and eventually immigrated to the U.S. legally. He got here with nothing. From that he has built a reasonably successful business. He is one of the hardest working, most honest, and personable people I have ever met. His business has grown because he takes care of his customers. He owns the American distributorship for IOR Scopes and he with some input from me, is designing the next generation of IOR optics.
2. IOR is one of the biggest optics companies in the world. IOR is many times the size of most of what you would consider the top tier optics makers. They have been in business for almost 100 years. They are one of the few companies that manufactures and assembles almost all the parts in their optics.
3. In regards to the IOR Sniper's Hide Edition, let me give you some information that has not been shared. IOR was the only company willing to work with the SH members to manufacture a reticle of their design. The cost for something like that today is nearly $10,000 to IOR. IOR did this for the SH members when no one else would and added nothing to the price of the scope to cover this design cost. IOR and Val wanted the scope tested prior to being released in mass but the SH members did not want to wait on field testing so it was delivered "as is". There was an internal part that was weak and ended up causing some issues but was replaced immediately in later scopes.
As far as this being called the Sniper's Hide model without Frank's permission? What else would you call it. The members came to IOR and ask them to build this scope with their reticle. They did that and didn't charge anyone those design costs. Frank says he wasn't compensated, that isn't true. He was given a free scope.
There is another issue that really bothers me about the accusations made that SH wasn't compensated for this. The fact that SH had their own scope designed by a company did much to legitimize SH as a website. It was one of the big turning points in this sites road to where it is today. Frank gained much by having a scope designed by the members of his website and in my opinion, the money IOR spent to design the reticle for his members was payment in full for calling the scope the SH version. Again, what the hell else would you have called it?
4. Quality-I have no doubt that the experiences some of you have had in past years with IOR's quality are true. In the 5 years I have been using them, I have had no issues so maybe I got lucky. I have looked at all the scopes in the line and while I personally think there needs to be a thinning of the herd, all of very solid quality. I pay almost $1500 per match to compete in PRS events and honestly my scopes are the only thing that haven't given me issues. I saw mention of "why risk a purchase with IOR" why not go with a proven company? I shoot with and against the best shooters in the country and I have personally seen guys have scope issues with every major brand made including Schmidt Bender, US Optics, NF, I personally had issues with a Bushnell H59 HDMR, and you don't want to know about Vortex. Not allot of issues with the exception of Vortex, but issues do occur. We run our stuff very, very hard and things break. My point here is that you can not buy yourself a guarantee of having no issues no matter what you spend. Does IOR have more issues TODAY than these other companies? Not that I have seen.
In truth, there are a lot of good optics being made today by a number of companies. That is why I sell more than one brand. What you need depends on what you are going to do with the scope. The information presented above is based on my personal experiences shooting professionally and my conversations with Val himself. If I have any facts wrong, I apologize but I have done my best to present some actual facts into this thread. For those of you that want to drag me into an argument on the Internet, don't bother trying. I have said what I have to say and I have 4 businesses to run and I try practice shooting 1-2 hours per day as well. Most of you don't put your names at the bottom of your posts, I do. Every time I reply to a topic on this website I risk something, do you?
If IOR makes a scope that suits your needs buy it. If SB, NF, or any of the others have something you like, buy it. 99% of the time you will get a good product from most of the top tier companies. It took me 4 days to get time to type this much so I apologize for coming into this so late.
