Here’s my attempt at muddying the waters even more for you lol.
I picked up a US made XTR3 3.3-18 and was very impressed with it. The glass was bright and sharp. The turrets were nice and crisp with solid detents and almost no play. But like an idiot I noticed the reticle would shift when changing directions in magnification and I sent it back to Burris before realizing this was normal for FFP optics. They decided to replace it with a new illuminated version (which I was pissed about because I bought the one I did because I wanted a US made scope, but that’s beside the point).
The replacement scope (still a 3.3-18) was definitely not as nice as the first. The glass was bright, but lost some of its sharpness up at 17-18x.
The best way I can describe the turrets is they felt like the detents were half as deep as they should be, had a thick application of a heavy grease, had too much resistance to turn, and had a little play between clicks. All this made a very mushy feeling turret that wasn’t going away after a few range sessions. After some reading, I decided to remove all of the excess factory applied “grease” from the main o-ring. This exponentially improved the feel of the turrets, though to me they still weren’t quite what I prefer. They felt like a lighter click, verses the thunk that the first scope had.
The XTR3 has good FOV (more on this later), a forgiving eye box, and nice depth of field. It tracks reliably, and is overall a very good scope, especially in it’s price range. I feel it handily beats out basically everything else in that $1000-$1500 range.
For comparison, I recently picked up an NX8 4-32. I had looked through one on a buddy’s rifle about a year ago and remember being relatively impressed. My current example is everything I had hoped it would be. The glass is as good or better than a Razor AMG that I had, and maintains its sharpness all the way up to 32x (provided it’s focused properly). The turrets are not the loudest, but they are definitive with almost no play. Interestingly the FOV in the middle of the mag range (10-20x ish, which is where I spend most of my time) is damn close to the XTR3. For instance, with both set to 18x, the XTR3 had about 22.7 Mils of FOV, the NX8 is right at 22 Mils. It’s close enough that I’ll never notice it.
The downside to the NX8 is that above 24x a few things happen. The eye box gets pretty tight (as expected from an 8x erector), the image starts to darken enough to notice, and the depth of field/parallax/focus gets pretty shallow, especially under 3-400ish yards. That said, I almost never shoot that high up, so it’s a non-issue for me. This scope is also very good at having zero parallax and being in focus at the same time, so when taking a shot on an animal, as long as you get the image crisp, then parallax will be zeroed out enough to not worry about.
So in conclusion, as far as the XTR3 goes, based on my sample size of 2, I feel the QC is not high enough to say it’s always at the same level as the mk5’s, NX8’s, etc. Are a lot of the XTR3s there? Possibly. Are all of them? Nope. Do they beat out comparably priced optics? Easily. Is it worth the extra cost to go with the next tier of optic? I’d say which one you choose depends on how neurotic you are about specific aspects of performance. Are you a hunter? Are you a competitor? Do you obsess over pure resolving power? FOV? Depth of field? Does it inspire confidence?
Personally, I’m keeping the NX8 on my hunting rifle. At the same time, for the price, it wouldn’t be my first choice on a PRS gun.
I have no experience with the XTR Pro, but based on what I’ve read, it sounds like it’s a step, or more, above the standard XTR3. It’s also in that next price bracket, so I would expect it to consistently perform with or above it’s peers.
