Vortex Razor and the Sig Sauer Tango 6 are internally the same scope. I don't know this first hand, but during US Army testing, one of the testing engineers told the the internals are idenitcal. Then, Sig won the Army contract over Vortex on price.
There are a handful of glass manufacturers that produce truly outstanding lenses. LOW is one. Zeiss is another.
I am sure everyone here on this forum is educated in such matters, but these sort of things show up on Google searches, and it is good to point out: In Japan, or Europe or China, or in the US, there are many OEM manufactuers for many brands. While one outfit might be very good at contract manufacturing, what we have found, is that even if they have an ISO9001 certified facility, they are going to build so spec and build to tollerance.
Spec is often what people look at in terms of buying, but tollerance is even more important. The finer one goes in the manufacturing specificity, tollerances are what really make a difference. WIth firms with very high tollerances, it is easy for a manufacturer to make a product that fails QA. However you define tollerance... Let me diverge a bit. Everyone has a front door. Let's say the spec is 36" wide. Great. Now, what is the tollerance. For my door, I may require the door to be water tight in case of a flood, so my spec is 36" +/- 0.01", and I will pay $2,000 for that door, but I know when it closes, that very little water will seep into my house. My neighbor is 20' higher than me, so the river never floods. He is okay with a 36" door, with +/- 0.25", and is okay with a little draft in the winter. His door is $200. And those doors could be made at the same factory. In the construction of my door, the attention to detail is very demanding. It takes far more time to get the measurements correct. And, one of out three doors fail to meet spec, and are discarded. Guess what happens to the door? It is used to fill orders for customers with less demanding specs.
So, while one OEM factory may make scopes or suppressors (yes, there are a lot of name brand suppressors not made by the brand) or barrel (huge number), the brand dictates the specification of materials, design and tollerance.
I have no idea if Nightforce is made by LOW. I know they do final assembly quite a bit in Idaho, and they have a good sized facility. Some NF scopes used to say, "Made in Japan." I am seeing fewer of those. I am pretty sure that NF uses LOW lenses, but again, the spec and tollerances make a huge difference.
I am interested in the Sig / Razor comment though. I am not sure I am curious enough to take a dremel and open it up.
