welcome to snapshots with the social regressive these are short videos as
opposed to the usual epic content I put out so let's go ahead and get to it
there's been a shift recently in kind of the mainstream optics market and I'm
really excited about this and I just had to pass this along for the longest time
pretty much everything that you could find like say back in the 90s at least
here in the u.s. pretty much everything was a crosshair style of reticle it was
set up for deer hunting and basically everything was second focal plane
everything was pretty limited and what you could do with it pretty much every
company I guess had some kind of mil-dot eventually you know once the 2000s
rolled around and actually the first scope that I ever really bought on
purpose instead of something that came with like a used rifle button bought or
something was this this is a Muller tactical 8.5 to 25 by 44 millimeter
scope I do highly recommend this if you're on a tight budget and you want
something you can do milling with great scope I've used this for a long long
time and use this on a lot of prairie dogs love the scope but really this it
wasn't all that common to even find say a mil dot scope you know there might be
one and say the top tier of course there was the Leopold mark for series where
you had more of the military style of reticles going on there you had
Nightforce which is definitely a big step up in price not so much from the
mark 4 but from everything else it was difficult for folks that you know they
just want to get out with a rifle they want to have some kind of decent reticle
where they can range targets they're just really weren't that many options
and just when things were starting to ramp up I would say you know kind of
post-war everybody's kind of concentrating on military style of
optics we kind of got sidetracked I think by a lot of these bullet drop
compensating reticles you can find these everywhere there's still just the scavs
of these things and to me I think they're just too limited the bullet drop
compensator ZAR cool if you need to have a rough estimate on a larger target if
you want to be able to you know kind of figure out your your rough
tops out at various ranges and they do work there pretty slick but myself I've
never had an inclination to buy one I've never wanted a bullet drop compensator
to me it's just too rough and really the sort of targets that I fire at tend to
be very small anyway like prairie dogs it's not going to be that useful I want
something where I can very accurately not only figure out my drops at a
certain range but I want to figure out what the range to the target is in the
first place so I want a good milling reticle and I'll actually be producing a
couple videos on some interesting topics related to optics and one of them is
going to be how to estimate range using a scope like a middle dot or mil hash or
something and this right here this is one that I went to later I bought my
first Falcon because I wanted something that was even more precise than a mil
dot scope so I ended up going with a mil hash so you know it kind of breaks
things down further from you know a full mil down to a half and I'm able to get
more precise measurement but anyway that's a something for later but what's
happening right now is that we seem to be swinging back away from the bullet
drop compensator and we're getting back into precise type of reticles the kind
that I like so we have three big companies that are all simultaneously
releasing some very interesting optics we'll start out at the top end we have
as far as price goes anyway we have the leupold vx-3 eye series and within that
you have hunting scopes on the vx-3 eye side and then if you go to the vx3 il RP
or long-range precision this is where you start to get into the fun stuff that
I like you get you know big turrets with all kinds of you know easy markings easy
to operate with your thumb you don't have to take any caps off or anything
and with that you're looking at about I guess 850 bucks I think on the on the
top end for summing here you get a choice of first focal plane or second
focal plane which is really cool you can typically I talked about this in another
video and I will be releasing a whole video on
P vs. s FB but in general you can get a little bit more precision out of an SSP
over FFP but F F P is easier great choices to have you know the same scope
and you can kind of pick either much like the the Falcons that have been
reviewing here you get a choice of FFP or SFP cool stuff and you also get a
choice of minute of angle or milliradian this is also an interesting shift in the
industry everything has been milliradian for a good long while you know as long
as you weren't in that BBC world or you know if you're in the hunting world that
was still MOA but as far as tactical sort of stuff went it was all
milliradian and then we're moving back toward minute of angle which in some
cases is going to get you a little bit more precision but mostly it's just
about what you're comfortable with here in the States
yeah we're pretty comfortable with inches rather than centimeters it's just
what we're used to dealing with on a day to day basis so it makes sense to pick
up a scope that works within that system and most of our ranges are set up four
yards rather than meters I like both of them I really do but I can see how a lot
of people in the US would want to go toward MOA rather than mrad now the vx-3
i LRP they're going to have really good glass everything from VX to on up has
some really sweet glass I assume that the VX 3 I even though I
haven't looked through one yet I'm sure it's going to have some really nice
glass on it it does not offer any illuminated reticles and so let's move
on down to the next price bracket down this is the Nikon X 1000 series this is
just an ad in the American Rifleman you can probably see these around so what
this does is it kind of takes a similar formula these are second focal plane
only everything in this series I believe a second focal point only but these do
start to offer some illuminated reticles on some of the higher magnification
models and they do have a really interesting one that is going to be
called the force 1000 and that's one of these AR style of optics that it's just
a 1 to 4 it has a small objective lens and actually this thing looks really
really cool this is one of the few AR I love optics that I think I would
actually want to buy it's it seems to be set up correctly for the way that I like
to work you get precision you actually get a regular milling sort of
reticle and then they just throw in a big horseshoe and to me this makes a
whole lot of sense especially in SFP because if you're backed off to one X
you're not going to be using the milling reticle it's very unlikely that you're
going to be say firing at 400 yards or 600 yards and one X you're going to be
zooming in in order to do that so that's where you're going to get your your
accurate you know your actual milling reticle is actually going to work at
that magnification and then you know if you have some kind of close quarter shot
you're backing off to one X and using the horseshoe brilliant brilliant setup
I think it's going to work out really well now those come in anywhere from 650
bucks down to I believe 400 that's how much that AR one is going to cost again
these look really good make sure you go check them out the next step down as far
as price goes is the Bushnell engage series and these continue in the same
vein with a 30 millimeter tube they continue with you know very complex
reticle and one of the things that I probably didn't mention early on just
because I was getting carried away is that we're not just looking at a mil dot
style of scope we're looking at something more precise in that these are
mill hash and what they do is instead of having you know a milliradian between
stadia they're going to go ahead and throw in intermediate lines so you're
going to get a half milliradian on the mrad ones on MOA it's going to be
splitting those up as well so you get very precise great for long-range
great for varminting and on this Bushnell engage line some of the
standouts to me are going to be 2 6 to 24 model that's going to be very good
for varmint errs that's one that I would want to pop on a rifle like this I think
it would be a very good match and then one of the other ones that I hope to get
my hands on is the two-and-a-half to 10 power model and this one I think would
be a good match for folks that are firing ARs or other you know military
style rifles it's going to have a really good zoom range it's going to be a
little bit quicker to work with for one good reason
one of the things you get into with second focal plane reticles is that if
you are changing your magnification then of course all of the values that you
might have on your range card or whatever they're going to be off they're
going to be some multiples or some factor of whatever you have on your card
as you start to zoom around so what you want is something where you can easily
kind of factor the change using you know in your head you might have to you know
switch over to paper or something but if you want to make easy calculations in
your head of what changed as your magnification change then you know
having an easy multiple or an easy factor is going to make things a whole
lot easier so a two and a half to ten at ten power that's going to be your you
know actual MOA measurement as you back down to five it's going to be two MOA
where you know it was one before it be two and then it's your back all the way
down to two-and-a-half it would be four so yeah easy to multiply easy to do the
math and especially if you're in the field so that's one that I'm going to
try to pop on my AR a little bit later this year I'm trying to see if I can get
my hands on one these things are brand-new I don't even know if they're
actually selling yet but I'm going to try to get one on the AR see how it does
and yeah I'm really excited just about the total change in the industry in
general I think it's a really good move especially as people are moving more
toward long-range precision work or getting into you know maybe target
work and for Varminters like me it's also a really nice thing thanks for
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