Rifle Scopes So, I threw my Arken off the shooting platform...

[Frankengrendel]

It's the nature of the beast to always be contentious about something.

As technology and processes develop, the cost of items goes down. This has always happened. The flat screen TV you can now buy at Walmart used to cost thousands when it first came out.

It is also possible to get good and usable optics that are not thousands of dollars.

For some, it is political and some people assume they can buy products that have no chinese parts to them. And that others are "too cheap" to buy the right stuff. Here's how you sell stuff that is made here in the USA. Price it to what the market will bear. I could use the same logic and say that if you are going to drive a car, then it needs to be a Lamborghini Countache. Otherwise, you're being "too cheap." That gets into the mindset that this is only for people with disposable income who can drop 4G on a scope. Or more than one scope. So, no one is "allowed" to buy lower priced optics until they can afford to do that which means that the family guy on a budget is priced out of any of it.

However, the people I know who hunt and shoot regularly really don't care about all this gucci purse swinging. For example, one of my bosses is a lifelong hunter and was taught well how to shoot at any distance. So, he took his Windham Weaponry AR-15 (approx $1,500 at the time) and a middle of the road and not most expensive optic and popped a balloon outside, in the wind, at 850 yards. It's the shooter, not the gear, so much. And the Windham Weaponry pieces are all affordable. I have one that costed about 1500. And one of their AR-10s that was around 1900.

And to counter the cheapest, it can be said that if you can save and afford a better optic, then do that. Instead of buying several cheapies.

Some of this guff is just hatred. The Cyclops said that between the Arken and the Vortex Venom, the Venom had noticable chromatic aberration and the Arken did not. I have seen other reviews where it was exactly opposite. That Arken had CA more noticable. In fact, one reviewer stated that he would no longer have Arken optics on his stuff primarily because of that.

TLDR, from personal experience, buy what you can afford that works well for you at the price you can afford and then, here is the hardest part, STFU. Because if it is a day that ends in the letter 'y', there will be someone to come along and dump a huge, steaming pile of feces on your choice.

Then, again, there was another thread where it was a free-for-all fecal fray to complain about all scopes, even the costlier ones. Why did that thread happen? IIRC, the day in question ended in the letter 'y'.

Very well said. Nice to hear some who is sensible and can see both sides of the budget scope issue.

 

[Dobermann]

No-one's talking about 'chucking them downrange'.

If field evals are not necessary, it's interesting how many scopes fail ...

Any chance of a video of the Burris machine so we can see what it's actually testing?

Paging @Birddog6424 ...

 

[Birddog6424]

Paging @Birddog6424 ...

Scopes will always fail. We already know that. There are some fine parts involved and things go wrong.

Torture test machinery is used in the design stage of a scope, and is used to recoil test scopes sent for repair or evaluation. Unfortunately they weren't testing anything at the time I was there, I would have loved to see them work and gotten video.

The machine in the top picture spins and/or wobbles. Applying centrifugal or lateral stress on the optic. Something pretty unlikely to occur in the wild. The larger yellow machine is a drop/recoil test. The device where the scope mounts can be moved so it can imitate an ocular or objective lens drop. Or it can be turned to mimic being dropped on its top or side. Each of these machines can be set to determine the breaking point of any scope.

Field tests for an optic are redundant. Manufacturers have already conducted a battery of stress tests in a controlled environment. Getting one to break because it was dropped on its head or got chucked down range doesn't teach us anything. We already know scopes break. Just because someone broke a scope doing things it wasn't designed for doesn't mean those scopes are more prone to breakage than any other model. Unfortunately, I think people may read one of these "tests" and infer that a scope failure means that model is somehow inferior. Which just isn't true. It's a sloppy test with a test subject of one. It gives us no useful statistical data.

 

[Emerson0311]

I know a lot of you guys like to pretend this is the range. But this is the internet. A lot of guys do a lot more bullshooting than actual shooting and start to forget the diffrence.

Beating the competetion..... this is getting as bad as all the "its pretty much a mk5 for 500 dollars."

Nope not missing the point saying outright. There are better scopes for 500 dollars and better companies to deal with and better countries to buy stuff from also.

Aren’t most of the scopes in the same price class made in the same factories with slightly different features, and now colours, and then branded whatever name the “new internet optics company” calls itself? They sure look the same.

 

[roostercogburn98]

NF's fail

You stop talking shit

 

[Dobermann]

Field tests for an optic are redundant. Manufacturers have already conducted a battery of stress tests in a controlled environment. Getting one to break because it was dropped on its head or got chucked down range doesn't teach us anything. We already know scopes break. Just because someone broke a scope doing things it wasn't designed for doesn't mean those scopes are more prone to breakage than any other model. Unfortunately, I think people may read one of these "tests" and infer that a scope failure means that model is somehow inferior. Which just isn't true. It's a sloppy test with a test subject of one. It gives us no useful statistical data.

Except that some brands and models often fail. And some almost always pass. Same set-up, same evaluation protocol. And, once again, no-one is "chucking them downrange" in these evaluations.

Scopes do take small falls, for example when a rifle is propped against a tree or truck. They ride around in truck beds. This should be what they're designed for. Some are, and pass the evals. Some aren't designed for this, and don't pass.

And the statistical aspect has been covered in detail: if you have a scope from a model that will fail the majority of the time, evaluating one and it fails can be indicative of wider failure. Models that rarely fail are more likely to have a single sample pass. Of course, larger sample sizes are better, but if the trend is one way or another for a particular model, then statistically, you're more likely to see that outcome in a single sample.

 

[Dobermann]

Aren’t most of the scopes in the same price class made in the same factories with slightly different features, and now colours, and then branded whatever name the “new internet optics company” calls itself? They sure look the same.

But internals can, and are, specc'd differently, overall build quality can differ, quality control differs, and protocols of testing before selling differ (or are non-existing for some companies, and meaningless for others).

 

[Birddog6424]

Field evals aren't going to reveal any of that.

You're going to get far better feedback just by being a participant on a large forum like this one. You'll see over time that some scopes have breakage issues.

One scope getting dropped on its head isn't going to reveal a trend or issue. They may break a perfectly good scope and send the wrong message. They may not break a crap scope.

Again, we learn nothing useful from these ridiculous back yard evals.

 

[Ronws]

Field evals aren't going to reveal any of that.

You're going to get far better feedback just by being a participant on a large forum like this one. You'll see over time that some scopes have breakage issues.

One scope getting dropped on its head isn't going to reveal a trend or issue. They may break a perfectly good scope and send the wrong message. They may not break a crap scope.

Again, we learn nothing useful from these ridiculous back yard evals.

Even that is few and far between. Once in a while, a specific person will have a specific problem with a scope and 98 percent of the time, get it fixed just fine on warranty.

What bothers me is the incessant dogma of always saying all of this or that particular brand are bad without actual case by case instances. Just something heard in forums and otherwhere on the interwebs. All those scopes break. All these scopes have bad CA.

Here is a little note: be wary of Chromatic Aberration complaints from videos. The reason is because all scopes get coatings. How those coatings are seen by the particular camera being used to film will affect what CA can be seen.