Optics/Sights

The $90 Vortex Triumph 10×28 HD binoculars are compact, lightweight, and surprisingly useful. I packed them for my honeymoon in the Dominican Republic, where they helped us discover a shipwreck and reminded me why the best optics are often the ones you actually bring along.

A long range scope has one job that matters more than the rest: when you dial 10 mils, the reticle has to move 10 mils, every time, and come back to zero. Clear glass is nice. Tracking you can trust is everything. Every scope in this guide was put on a rifle and shot by [...]

The SIG Sauer XRAY5 throws out the mechanical zeroing system pistol red dots have relied on for decades. With a fixed 225-dot matrix, enclosed housing and zero-distortion optical system, this solid-state optic may be SIG’s most interesting pistol red dot yet.

The best Vortex scopes cover just about every job a rifle or pistol can do, from a budget deer scope to an LPVO that costs more than most of the rifles it rides on. That range is the reason Vortex is the brand so many shooters start with, and the reason it is so easy [...]

The Arken EP-5 GENII 7-35×56 delivers sharp glass, confident tracking, and competition-ready controls for $749. It is not perfect, but this precision rifle scope performs well above the price printed on the box.

The best spotting scopes of 2026 do the job your binoculars cannot. A good 10x binocular finds the animal. A spotting scope tells you whether that buck is a shooter, whether that ram is legal, and whether that bullet hit the steel at 900 yards or kicked up dirt behind it. If you hunt open [...]

The VX-Freedom still proves you do not need mortgage-payment money to put dependable Leupold glass on a rifle. But in 2026, the harder question is whether the VX-3HD or VX-5HD gives you enough extra performance to justify climbing the ladder.

The Zero Compromise Optic ZC210 is expensive, heavy enough to notice, and missing true 1x. After shooting it to 1,000 yards, into darkness, and behind a thermal clip-on, I also found it frustratingly hard not to like.

The DNT ThermNight TNC635R packs 640 thermal, digital day and night vision, a laser rangefinder, IR illuminator, and ballistic calculator into one optic. After extensive range work and several nighttime hunts, the surprise was not how much it does, but how well those systems work together.