what's your scope recommendation?

[1/2 slam]

Go with the Swarovski. The others mentioned here are good but I find the Swarovski better.

[BCBRAD]

My understanding, albeit incomplete, is that the diameter of the bell has more to do with the transmission of light rather than clarity. That is, how long the scope can be seen through as darkness falls. Generally speaking the larger the bell the more light that is transmitted, ergo the earlier/later you can use the scope.

In most areas of life everything comes at a cost and the extra light transmission is no exception. The larger diameter lenses require the rifle to be mounted higher up from the action creating potential cheek weld and/or parallax issues.

More importantly the larger lenses are much harder to make at a higher quality level so the clarity and sharpness of your image may actually degrade with lower quality large diameter objective bells even though more light is transmitted.

With all things being equal there should be no difference in clarity between a 40mm and 50mm objective but this ain't Oz and unless you pay you will not get the same clarity.

So it is a trade off. For me 40mm is a nice compromise between light transmission and glass quality. Hope that helps...


http://www.opticsplanet.com/howto/ho...html?section=1

This link has a menu that covers rifle scope 101, not bad explanations. Light transmission is part 4.

Agreed, but there are other things to consider. EG: a 6x42 scope will give an exit pupil of 7mm, that's the max for a young eye. If your in your 40's think about 5mm being average exit pupil, the older you get the worse it gets, varies amongst individuals of course. What ever imperfections the glass has will be magnified as the power goes up. So , clarity is a combination of glass quality and power. A S&B 6x42 has great quality glass and superb clarity but compared to a Leupold at quarter the price you won't see much difference in the two as the power level in the Leupold is not enough to show the imperfections of the optic. Its when you get into 12X and beyond were it starts to show. So an average quality optic may need 12X to get the definition you need will looking into dark timber were a high quality optic may only need 6X. Also, even though the exit pupil is larger than your eye can use the scope just looks brighter, bigger and much easier to align your eye to the target. I think the 6x42 Leupold does all of this even considering the quality of the glass, seems all good points of an optic cross paths with this scope. YMMV

[kennyg826]

Interesting. Thanks for the info.

[hookedonblacktails]

Just to add to the topic of the larger 50ml objectives, I briefly owned a vx2 3-9x50 thinking I was going to get night time vision and after a couple of evenings testing it in my backyard at last light there was honestly very very little difference between that and a vx1 4-12x40, nikon prostaff 2-7x33, and a vortex diamondback 4-12x40. So back to the store it went to trade for a zeiss conquest 3-9x40, same money but better optics in my opinion without a big honkin bell on it. Much better to use that extra money spent on the larger objective and put it toward a more higher quality scope in 40ml range. Over on the optics talk forum or whatever it's called the whole 50ml objective thing is quite controversial it seems. Some say you need 30ml tube to see the benefits, others say you need very high quality glass to start with for the larger objective to do anything, some say it's just a big selling gimmick by the scope companies

[wlbc]

Agreed, but there are other things to consider. EG: a 6x42 scope will give an exit pupil of 7mm, that's the max for a young eye. If your in your 40's think about 5mm being average exit pupil, the older you get the worse it gets, varies amongst individuals of course. What ever imperfections the glass has will be magnified as the power goes up. So , clarity is a combination of glass quality and power. A S&B 6x42 has great quality glass and superb clarity but compared to a Leupold at quarter the price you won't see much difference in the two as the power level in the Leupold is not enough to show the imperfections of the optic. Its when you get into 12X and beyond were it starts to show. So an average quality optic may need 12X to get the definition you need will looking into dark timber were a high quality optic may only need 6X. Also, even though the exit pupil is larger than your eye can use the scope just looks brighter, bigger and much easier to align your eye to the target. I think the 6x42 Leupold does all of this even considering the quality of the glass, seems all good points of an optic cross paths with this scope. YMMV

Good additional points.

I'm going to have to look through a new Leupold fixed power, to be fair both of my fixed 4x's are M8's which dates them some and their glass when compared to new glass is kind of yellowy (I'm not sure if that's a word).