Got one of these last week, for the $900 range it's seems okay, range time will tell though. I tend to run PST 2's on my budget range guns, mostly because if it breaks I'm not in a comp etc. and I brought 5 other guns to shoot (to be fair I have several and have never had one go down, in fact I've had more Razor Gen 2's 4.5-27's fail than PST 2's), and the fact you can get PST 2 5-25's under $700 now so they are a good bang for the buck. However I figured if the XTR 3 lives up to the hype for only $200 more why not, might be a good time to update a few PST 2's. I know folks love to hate the PST 2, and it has it's issues, but I've tried a lot of other hype scopes in the price range and at $700 it's hard to beat for just a range beater.
No comments on optical yet, obviously commenting on durability on a week old scope is silly. I never would anyway I don't beat on my stuff. It was easy to get the reticle focused, and FOV and eyebox seem pretty nice at the price point. Including decent flip covers was appreciated as opposed to a lot of scopes that just give you junk elastic covers.
The saw teeth is funny, it's uncomfortable and super non-functional at the same time. The reason it's painful is it doesn't provide much grip so you have to clamp down on it to the point it hurts. It's probably a cost decision but a tight checkering/knurling or even stippling on something like rotary surfaces is MUCH more effective at providing grip than giant teeth ever will be, even when wet or with sweaty hands, plus it doesn't hurt. The only time the coarse teeth are probably better is if you bathe your scope in mud. For those that hate it an old trick for things like this is to go buy a road bike inner tube, and cut out a small circle and stretch it over the area.
Obviously the reticle is pretty thin at 5x, but so are most of the others, I'd say the PST 2 is a bit better to see at 5x, but most of us are never using these scopes at 5x. Illumination was not great, PST 2 has probably 1-2 brighter levels, and the PST 2 illuminates the whole reticle not just the center cross.
Probably my biggest disappointment is the knob feel. The elevation is audibly loud, and the clicks feel solid when you hit them, but it's very mushy/stiff between clicks and there's slop between the clicks. I'd say between 0.25 and 0.5 mil on mine you can wiggle the knob back and forth easily when you hit a click. Lighter grease helped a bit with the mushy feel, but not the slop. The windage feels completely different and even worse, clicks are light and knob is heavy/mushy, so it's easy to go past clicks, but no slop like the elevation has so that's good. The windage/elevation almost feel like two totally different scopes. The worst PST 2 sample I have is significantly better in knob feel IMO. The PST 2 knobs I feel are too easy to move, but the clicks are good and there's zero slop when you settle on a click. Sometimes knobs "break in" but these are pretty rough, so I don't think they are going to magically turn into nice ones.
I don't really care much, but I do like being able to dial a few clicks below zero.
Most of us probably don't need one, but I thought the manual was pretty poor. There's very little actual detail in it compared to other scopes I've had.
Be interesting to see how it goes after a few range visits and optically etc. but at least at this point I'm not going to run out and buy a bunch to replace all those PST 2's based on just my initial impressions. Might be blown away by it optically so who knows.
