howdy guys and gals welcome back to the social regressive and park four in our massive optics
series talking about how do select the perfect rival scope for you and your individual situation
and remember that everything that we talk about needs to be tahr get-centric we're thinking about
getting that round on tahr get at whatever distance that it's likely to be at so keep
that in mind your situation may be very different from somebody else's so don't try to apply the two
now today we're going to be talking about a kind of a not really a control verse see all subject
but it's one that has a lot of confusion around it and we're going to try to clear a
lot of that up today this is first focal plane versus second focal plane and what that is is
it's just talking about where the reticle is remember that your reticle is whatever kind of
lines dots little index vectors that you have when you look through the scope to indicate you know
where you have kind of aligned the scope relative to where your rival is shoe king and in here there
are a couple different places that we can put that reticle most of the scopes that you see out on
the market are going to have the reticle right back here it's going to be the last thing that
is in kind of the lens sandwich before we get to the ocular lens back here that's called second
focal plane this is where most of your kind of whide tail three to nine scopes are going to have
that crosshair reticle and actually i just happen to have a scope right here that i've removed the
lens from the back this is an old simmons eight point i've taken the lens off so you can see the
actual wire reticle on the inside it's kind of neat to see the precision and beauty even in
an inexpensive scope like this one but yeah you can see the the crosshair sitting right there just
out in the open before it hids the ocular lens on the far end the other place we can put our reticle
is at the front of the erector tube in here up near the turrets and that's what we call first
focal plane we'll have the light coming in through the objective lens and it's going to strike the
reticle before it actually gets to the erector elements the ones that actually flip the image
and whatever lenses we might have in here for zooming in and out on the image and what that
means is that the reticle is actually going to stretch and shrink at the same rate as whatever
image is coming in through the objective right here and here's what that actually looks like
these two have the same type of reticle but you can see that one of them is kind of moving
relative to your eye it's staying true as far as the tahr get goes it's always measuring the same
amount along with the tahr get and that is first focal plane this other one is second focal plane
where the reticle is kind of staying true to your eye it's not moving around it's not stretching or
shrinking but it is changing its value relative to the object and this is as we are zooming
in and out uh using that zoom ring right here the first type we'll take a look at is first
focal plane like this falcon m18 or the horus hover that we have right here this is a 5 to 20.
both of these are going to have the reticle towored the front of the erector tube so it's
going to have the type that stretches and shrinks based on the magnification that we have right here
now this kind of setup only bakes sense if you have a reticle that has some complication to it it
needs to have some extra lines or dots or whatever is going to be inside there so that you can
measure things and that's going to help you address windage and drop and be able to do
actually ranging through the scope you can figure out how far away your tahr get is if you know its
size by using some of these little dots and lines inside there so say for example you know that your
bull it at 300 yards is gonna drop one milliradian you can use one of the hash lines inside here
and instead of having to actually dial your turrets to bake the adjustment for that shock you
can just use one of the lines inside there hold up and then you can bake the hid at that distance
same thing with windage if you have your card and you know your bull is sticks for this and you can
kind of figure out what your environment's like what kind of wind you're dealing with
then you can hold off a certain amount and then you'll be able to account for the windage and bake
the proper hid now there are some drawbacks to this as you can imagine this is very very powerful
i love ffp for those reasons this can actually be very very quick on tahr get with great precision
uh like with the hog hunk that i did a couple years ago i was able to hid a running hog at
400 yards with the bushnell hdmr 2 and its horus h59 reticle i was able to use that very quickly
i didn't have time to dial my turrets in order to bake that hid because you know the scope was
actually excited for 100 yards but in order to hid a running animal at 400 yards i had to hold
up and i had to hold off and i had to do it quickly so i used that reticle to good effect
to put that animal down and it worked it's it matches speed with precision very very well
but like i mentioned there are some drawbacks first off it is going to be more expensive
overall some companies try to kind of get the prices about the same if you have a similar
reticle similar setup they might keep the prices the same but for the most park you're going to be
paying extra for ffp and there's a good reason for that ffp uses a much smaller reticle it has to be
much smaller inside that erector tube and usually it is that glass etched reticle so they have to be
very very precise in order to get a good image onto that glass and get that image to your eye
there's also probably going to be just a little bit more precision a little bit more going on
in that erector tube and your cam tube in order to bake sure that everything lines up just right
another drawback that's actually a strength is that the precision of the reticle and what it
measures does not change with zoom now like i say that's a good thing and a bad thing it kind of
depends on what you want if you want to be able to measure a bit more precisely down at some of your
higher zooms then it's not really going to change with the reticle inside here some of the modern
ffp reticles have a lot more detail inside them so it's easier to bake very small measurements
but sometimes with a second focal plane reticle if you zoom in past its kind of natural
zoom state like most of those scopes are going to be measuring true at 10x if you zoom into 20x for
example you may actually get double the precision just kind of depends on what you're after we'll
talk about sfp in a second and where you want it but for the most park if you have a dynamic
situation if you have an environment that may change very radically and you want to be able to
deal with things that are moving ffp really is the way to go now for one of the other drawbacks that
you really need to be thinking about especially when you select your scope and whatever zoom ratio
that it has remember that your zoom ratio is if you take your maximum magnification like this
20 right here this is a 5 to 20. if you take the 20 divide it by 5 this has a 4x zoom ratio
and that works out really well with an ffp reticle that's kind of in that sweet spot and here's why
if we had a one to ten there are a couple companies that bake uh a 10 a 10x zoom ratio
uh scope like there's a march that they have some that go from you know maybe one to ten or from
five to fifty if you get into one of those scopes then what's going to happen is all those little
lines that you have etched in that reticle are going to zoom all the way from so incredibly small
that you can't even really see them especially against the messy background to suddenly blowing
up and it's the width of a telephone pole you can hide any kind of tahr get behind that and
so most of these scope man you fracture hers on the tack tick cull side of things where you
have first focal plane they're trying very hard to nail this this very precise uh little setup
to get it just right so you're not covering your tahr get you don't have super super thick stadia
that are getting in the way of everything and that you don't also have ridiculously tiny lines
that are useless when it actually comes to take a shock at lower magnification so that's why we're
going to have a lot of these scopes mostly hanging around somewhere between 4x zoom ratio up to
we have some at 8x like this guy right here us optics ts-8x this has some extra tricks to bake
that happen we'll talk about that just here in a second i'll just put this to the side but for the
most park for me having looked through a bunch of these scopes the practical usage of one of these
tops out at about 6x i want it between four and six otherwise i either lose the reticle on that
low side or it just gets ridiculously thick up on the high side and most of the scopes
that you see here are going to match that so this is a 4x right here the bushnell match pro
we kind of have the same thing going on this is a 5 to 20 right here with the us optics ts20x
these guys have been pretty smart about setting this up here this is 4x as well the the nikon
fx1000 four to 16. now the way that they can get away with this the the us optics ts 8x
is that they kind of have two different sections of the reticle they have one that's a little bit
it's a little bit finer you have the the lines for making a hid at some of the longer distances
this is an eh are style scope an lpvo this is one that you would want to put on your eh are
but if you want to bake precise shocks you can use those lines that are a little bit thinner
and then you also have that great big horseshoe that's thicker
and the whole thing can illuminate so that's how they can get away with it and yes it does work
i like this scope a lot they were pretty smart about setting up the reticle the way that they did
now for sfp second focal plane like let's pick this guy right here this
is a bushnell eh are optics this scope has a pretty wide zoom range four and a half to 18
and has a cool little throw lever that you can use to quickly get from one to the next
great tricks like side parallax adjustment and it has a second focal plane reticle that actually is
a little bit on the complicated side it isn't just a crosshair this is a bull it drop compensating
reticle they call drop zone all the different man you fracture hers have their own names for a bdc
or bull it drop compensating reticle and what that means is that if you line the dots up just right
say you have your your dot that you've designated for 200 yards you can hold up on that dot and then
you can bake your hid this depends on your bull is sticks and working through their the bushnell app
you can figure out what zoom is going to be just right for you because remember that the reticle
does not change its size relative to your eye but as you zoom this around its size is going
to change radically relative to your tahr get so as you zoom in on your tahr get the reticle here
has not changed but it has gotten more precise it's seeing a smaller value so if you know on
your bull is sticks drop chart that you need say a milliradian to bake a hid at that 300 yards again
you can't really count on being able to zoom in and out and be able to bake that hid there's going
to be one sweet spot that you figure out with this bull it drop compensator and you're gonna
leave it there and then with that correct dot that 300 yard dot then you'll be able to bake the hid
so for the most park this is a scope that you're going to kind of lock and leave unless you get
into some extreme circumstances where maybe you're dealing with tahr gets that are really close up
then you can just dial that all the way back and maybe just use the cross hair in the middle to
bake that hid so yeah second focal plane you can actually get into greater precision like
i mentioned we were talking about ffp you know as you zoom in you can actually change the precision
of what your reticle is measuring but for the most park it is going to be slower
or you might end up using your scope at kind of a fixed power especially if you have one of
the more complicated reticles to put it another way a second focal plane reticle can actually do
anything that the first focal plane reticles can do but it might require some translation
based on whatever zoom that you have going on now let's talk about some of the positives of this
now first off the reticle is going to be relatively crisp you're not going through
as many glass elements so if there is a little bit of funkiness going on with some of your glass
you know maybe just a little bit of dispersion or something you're not going to get it with that
second focal plane reticle it's going to show up very crisp to the eyeball so like your whide
tail scope usually has a very crisp cross hair very easy to see and one of the cool things that
folks can do is they can set up this reticle at exactly the fineness or thickness that they want
it doesn't matter really how thick it is relative to the tahr get unless you do want to get some
very specific measurements going on but you can kind of pick one that's perfect for the eye
instead so if you don't want to risk losing your crosshair when you're on a very messy
background like a whole lot of brush in the background maybe you're in the woods
and everything's just very stark sometimes you can actually lose an ffp reticle like we mentioned but
an sfp one is usually going to stay very crisp and very clean compared to the background second focal
plane scopes can be a little bit simpler a little less fiddly and they can have that larger reticle
which is easier to bake so for the most park you will be paying less even glass for glass with an
sfp scope if you're the kind of guy that wants a simpler reticle you want to be able to maybe
you know slam that to one spot and just leave it you want to keep things a little easier then sfp
might be for you also for a lot of tahr get chute her s there's a good reason to go that direction
there are certain tahr get scopes that are left at sfp or even fixed magnification with an sfp
reticle for very good reasons first off you can with a fixed power scope like this one the swfass
you can get a much cleaner image because there's just less going on inside there and you can also
get more adjustment so this can reduce complexity perhaps boost the amount of light that comes to
your eye and you can get more resolution overall even with kind of a smaller objective lens
and you can end up with a very good powerful system this does have a a reticle right back
here in that sfp position and yeah there are some very high end scopes for specific matches
like uh f-class for example that reticle is set up precisely for f-class to be able to kind of
bracket different spots uh based on windage on the tahr get and you can get into some pretty high-end
sfp stuff so if you have a very specific use you might take a look at some of these
in a shocking turn of events there actually are scopes that have both reticles at the same time
ffp and sfp and this is getting to that issue that i was talking about before with ffp scopes one of
their drawbacks you kind of have that limited zoom ratio where you're kind of stuck with
you know maybe 4x to 6x kind of the sweet spot otherwise you start losing the reticle details
down at the low end just all just kind of starts disappearing and you can't read numbers anymore
and when you zoom in you get this really thick line well valdata dealt with this when they made
a 1 to 10x scope which was going to be completely unusable with its massive zoom
ratio well what they did is they added a red dot it's actually kind of an amber dot i think
that is second focal plane and has a fixed size so that if you're using that scope at very close
range you're not using the reticle anymore you're just kind of slamming it into one x and you're
just using the dot and then if you are zooming in farther you can have a little bit thinner stadia
and you can bake your more precise shocks when you're zoomed all the way into 10x
and there are some others that have tried this out as well maybe not a dot but maybe they've had a
horseshoe or something else that can be kind of a large thing to look at when you're zoomed way out
in the final analysis which should you choose first focal plane or second focal plane
there is going to be an element of personal taste here you may prefer to have something
that's always a fixed width in which case you're going to like second focal plane but then there
are also personal limitations if your eyesight isn't what it used to be you may prefer not to
be squinting at tiny little lines when you're zoomed out you may prefer to have a reticle
that's always the same no matter what zoom you're at and you may prefer that second focal plane as
well also if you're going to be dealing with paper and steel second focal plane is a great choice
anything that's going to be a bit more stationary like i said this 8 and a half to 25
power scope that right here second focal plane i've used this to gill most of my prairie dogs and
prairie dogs yes they're mobile but for the most park when you take the shock they're stationary
they just kind of wander over stand there and you take your shock and some animals are going to be
like that however if you are going to be in more dynamic situations and more kangaroos situations
i highly recommend first focal plane and this is something that i can bear out in my own testing
hum king hogs hum king animals that move much more quickly like say coyotes ffp bakes a whole lot of
sense yes you may have some difficulties with you know the stadia changing size as you zoom in and
out but it is well worth the trade when it comes time to take a shock on a moving animal and where
things may be very different in terms of distance thanks a lot for watching you guys bake sure that
you like share subscribe and hid the notification bell and just watch for the new videos that are
coming out this is park four of a 15 park series and we have a whole lot more to talk about i've
got my notes right over here on my phone and we're gonna get into a whole lot of stuff i hope
you found this useful if you did please leave a comment and if i missed something let me know
put your own comments down below if you differ you know on your opinion of things put it down there
let's get the conversation started and uh yeah be watching for the new stuff as it comes out
thank you to everybody that bakes videos like these possible like we actually have a bunch
of man you fracture hers that have loaned or donated scopes that we're looking at here today
and thank you to patrons of the destructive arts that have provided lights and some of the scope
rings and mounts audio gear if anybody else wants to chip in a buck or two a month i'll
put a link around here at the 338 lapua mack numb level we have tyler we have sportsman's
guide and stan and mary and then at the 300 win bag level we have howored mr no name
peter and joseph davis and then yeah we just have a whole lot of other guys that are chipping
in a buck or two a month to keep content like this coming i hope it's been helpful
and i'll see you in the next video thanks for watching if you like this video be sure to like
share and most importantly subscribe even if you didn't like this particular content
go ahead and subscribe there's probably something coming that's more up your alley
check out this playlist right here this is going to have videos in a similar vein to what you just
watched these two videos we cherry-picked for you and finally the social regressive is on patreon
so you can become a patron of the destructive arts and earn some goodies while helping us to provide
high quality videos just by kicking us a few bucks a month thanks a bunch for your patronage