Thought I would give a comparison of the new Bushnell LRHS 3-9x44 to some other higher end scopes; 5-25x56 Steiner MSR, 5-20x50 Vortex Razor and a Zeiss 4-16x50 Diavari T* FL with Z800 reticle (SFP). As the light really faded, I also grabbed a Zeiss Diavari 2.5-10x50 (SFP) with 60 reticle, a single adjustable lighted dot in the center of a Plex type reticle without the thicker crosshair on the top portion.
Wife sent me a note that my scope had arrived so I hurried home from work and rolled in the door a few minutes before sundown and opened the LRHS packaging. Initial handling and manipulation of the controls were all positive and the glass looked much better than the Bushnell Elite Tactical 6-24x50 I sent back a few weeks ago and replaced with the Razor. I grabbed the wife’s ironing board and set it up on my back porch with the above mentioned scopes which were all mounted on rifles and were sighted in on the same birdhouse tacked onto a pine at 72 yards, verified with the Bushnell Scout 5-1000 ARC DX that was also purchased as an option for the LRHS group buy
I didn’t have the LRHS mounted but it was also sighted on the birdhouse as it rested on the ironing board. In general, this is a very demanding scope test even though it was only 72 yards. The birdhouse is to the west of my porch and above the Florida ground cover just far enough to easily see it on the tall pine but there is enough field of view with a slight sight adjustment to look down into the brush line.
By the time I had all the optics pointed at the birdhouse it was 1900 central and the sun was low and already into the tall pines approximately 30 degrees off the line of sight from the scope to the birdhouse. I’ve done some other tests on scopes at dusk with the same setup and you can really see how the scopes handle the flare control (if that’s the proper optical term) ie, the sun causes the scope to white-out to varying degrees. To complicate things even more, there are sodium vapor lights directly behind the birdhouse off in the distance.
I’m no optics expert, I just go by what my eyes tell me. I set all the scopes to approximately 12x (except for the Zeiss 2.5-10x50) and didn’t change them.
Overall, during the brightest portion of my “test” – all scopes did very well and in general the optics were comparable, the Steiner and Zeiss being top notch but the Razor and LRHS were also right there. This was only at 72 yards so no longer range optics evaluation yet. A couple of comments on both of the Zeiss scopes, how in the world do they make the Diavari’s so easy to look through, you immediately notice the difference looking through them with such a small black ring around the image!
The quickly fading low and the off angle sunlight really stresses scopes. The Steiner easily handled the adverse lighting with the Vortex coming in second and easily besting the Zeiss FL which was just a bit better than the LRHS with sunshade. I did play with the sunshades on the Vortex and LRHS for a couple of minutes which seemed to help a tad with the white-out effect. As expected, the Steiner with the bigger 56mm objective was the last to lose the birdhouse and it was very dark. The LRHS reticle on 12x was bold enough to make a shot into the brush line very late. If you use the LRHS on low power in the evening against a dark background the “donut of death” may be difficult to pick up if you are presented with a close up shot. I was surprised by the Zeiss Z800, it was nice and bold and I would have been able to make a shot at last light close in with it also. I liked the 2.5-10x50 Zeiss with the dot set to a very low level of brightness the best for closer in work at dusk. The Steiner is also able to adjust to a low enough brightness level to be used effectively at dusk but the Razor was too bright even at its lowest setting. Yes, different tools for different circumstances.
The LRHS parallax control was very good, the Razor was the worst as it had some start up friction before it settled while the Steiner and Zeiss were also very good. The click adjustments on the turrets of the LRHS and Razor were superb, the Steiner was less tactile. I may send the Steiner in to see if it had the turret upgrade performed since it was a demo unit that I purchased last year at this time. I didn’t perceive any tunneling effect on the LRHS when going from low to high power.
I was able to find a Leupold Mark 2 one piece mount locally and mounted the LRHS on a 450 Bushmaster that I hadn’t shot yet and gave it a go at K&M this past weekend. The optics were very bright and my earlier thoughts on the positive controls were affirmed. I was only able to squeeze off a few rounds and make one adjustment which seemed to track well, I say seemed because the next two shots were way off and left me scratching my noggin until I noticed the scope had slipped in the mount. I had the torque of the single ring screw on each side of the Leupold mount set to approximately 24 in lbs but it wasn’t enough for the recoil of the 450 Bushmaster. I stopped at that point as it was my wife’s birthday and she wanted to get to the beach (we had already shot 350 rounds of 9 and 10mm that morning)!
I’ll continue to evaluate the LRHS over the next few months and if there are any specific questions let me know and I’ll try to answer them. Thank you to George Gardner and Pat Sinclair for putting this scope together and to Bushnell for supporting the hunters out there!
Edge