Re: What makes an FFP more costly than SFP?
Great info on that. I watched a show on cable awhile back about making Zeiss scopes in their factory and it was amazing at how much went into building their scopes. The steril enviroment in which they put them together and the quality of material and the steps they go through is what makes them worth every penny.<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: David S.</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Yeah right, the worldwide scopemaker cartel has struck again, fixed the prices and is ripping everybody off. And of course some people who don't know jack shit about what goes into making a scope know this for a fact.
Seriously though, here are some of the main points. In a FFP scope the placement of the reticle makes it compete with adjustment range and FOV on low power, so you have a three-way tradeoff dilemma. Maximizing all three desirable factors is a major design challenge, which equals higher cost for engineering.
Furthermore, the reticle itself has to be much smaller than in a SFP scope, by a factor of 3-5x, depending on the zoom ratio. Many of the highend FFP scopes have reticles that approach the limit of what is technologically possible today and only very few companies are able to supply these fine structures with consistently high quality. If you know what to look for, you will find that lesser quality FFP scopes tend to show imperfections in the reticle or use comparably coarse structures to start with. Working at the limit of what is technically possible is always expensive.
Another factor is cleanliness during assembly. Any dust particles on the reticle will appear 3-5x bigger in a FFP scope compared to a SFP scpope, again depending on zoom factor. To make matters worse, the FFP reticle is exposed to a much bigger part of the interior of the scope, making contamination with any free-floating microscopic piece of crap inside the scope more likely. Tighter specifications for cleaneliness cost money because of the necessary technical precautions and skill of the workers assembling the scope.
Another factor that adds to the perception that FFP scopes are significantly more expensive is that as serious tools for a serious job, they tend to be of overall better quality, which just coincides with them being FFP because of what they are designed to do. They are a "specialty item" when comparing market shares, and anything that is made in smaller quantities is more expensive relatively due to the economy of scale.
The list isn't complete, but these are the main points I can think of off the top of my head.
So overall, making a FFP scope with low zoom factor, mediocre adjustment range, lots of tunneling and a fat and dirty reticle shouldn't cost more than making an average SFP scope, but since nobody wants really crappy FFP scopes, they tend to cost more. </div></div>
