scope

Shadows lengthened across the North Idaho canyon, reaching tentative fingers into every sunlit opening. Bears were on the menu tonight, and I sat, back to a small tree, watching the slopes and timbered openings across a small canyon.

With all that Bushnell has done for its professional-grade lines, you might think they had forgotten the hunters. Well, you would have thought wrong. This week, we got down and dirty with a new product from the Bushnell Prime line. If your Christmas missed the mark, fear not. These bad boys won’t.

If you’re willing to buy a scope without the Made in the USA sticker, what are your options? What kind of features, quality, and price points can you expect from scopes made in China, South Korea, or the Philippines? To get a sense of the market, I chose three scopes to test…

It looks like a traditional rifle scope and is a much better fit on your bolt gun. It’ll pick up targets at 2,300 yards and survive a swim in the creek.

Learn how to mount a scope. If your equipment fails you on the shot of a lifetime, don’t let it be the fault of an over-glorified Walmart greeter.

When it comes to long-range competition, the automatic assumption is that you need a riflescope that’s equal or greater in cost to most people’s house payment in order to compete. While you can certainly go that route, there’s also a lot to be said about budget-friendly glass that’s still more than qualified to take on the benchmark 1,000-yard shot. A case in point is Nikon’s new Black X1000, a scope engineered from the ground up to tackle the precision rifle game.

The first thing that comes to mind when someone says Steiner to most U.S. veterans is the ubiquitous Steiner 10×50 binoculars. These were a staple in every unit I ever served in, and had a great reputation for clarity and toughness. German glass is legendary in sniper circles for clarity and lack of imperfections. I was never issued a Steiner, but I had enough of the other Kraut options to know I should jump at the chance to test a myriad of Steiner glass.

I’ll bet most of us tend to give only passing thought to reticle selection, but there’s a reason that there are somewhere over 96.2 billion reticle designs floating around out there. They’re designed for specific purposes.

Zeiss makes some incredible optics. This year, they’re launching the V8 series. These feature an intuitive auto-on/auto-off feature that adds a red dot to their crystal clear glass, customizable turrets, and everything you need to get in the field (except the gun and ammo).