Thread: Cheap gear that surprises you

Originally Posted by Ultimitsu

I normally do my research before I buy, so all that I have to share is a list of items that are other wise fairly cheap but performs very well given their price.

* Convoy Torch, SST40, $40, super bright, very good battery life running a single 217100.
* 30mm rings with 30 MOA slop, $30, so far so good.
* ultra low and lightweight 11mm->20mm rail, $7. This thing allowed mounting of the above 30moa rings to an Anschutz, now I can reach to 250m. The alternative is to buy a one piece rail and drill holes and screw onto the Annie's receiver.

What about the 'scopes you imported and tried. Have they prevailed?
Im thinking that since you talked about them Chinese made 'scopes have made a big leap forward and US brands are having scopes made in China. . Worth another try? You, not me.

Originally Posted by Tahr

What about the 'scopes you imported and tried. Have they prevailed?
Im thinking that since you talked about them Chinese made 'scopes have made a big leap forward and US brands are having scopes made in China. . Worth another try? You, not me.

Yeah, so I got quite a few. By and large they work well , but my overall assessment is that they are not "Cheap gear that surprises you".

Some observations -

* They are generally feature packed for their price - lockable turrets, dotted/marked reticles (more on this later), side focus, fairly good adjustment range (~70MOA, or 25+ MIL), magnification throw lever, scope cover (sometimes aluminium ones), sunshade, Mil/mil, illuminated crosshair/dot etc.
* For their price, they often have good optical quality. They use the same glass as other Made in China big brand scopes.
* But, some tend to over-stretch their optical limit. I have a 2-20x44 Mil FFP, the image quality is quite good up to 10x, goes down some what after that, then gets decidedly worse between 16-20. I use it under 14x. As a 2-14 powered scope, it is fairly good.
* They copy dotted/marked reticles from well known brands, but almost always get the ratio wrong. You would think that the markings should be whole numbers of MIL or MOA, but they are not. The two which I was offered to review, one is a 2-16x44 MOA SFP, in my review I explained that each marking is in fact 0.6 and 1.2MOA at maximum magnification instead of 1 or 2 MOA as you would expect. The other scope is a 5-20x50 MIL FFP, the markings are not 1mil apart, but 0.8 mil apart. The most recent one I received is a 4-16x42 Mil FFP, it seems to have good glass but the markings are 0.6 mil apart instead of 1 mil. So you need to remember of these odd ratios and put them into your calculation for ranging and hold over.
* Their reticles tend to be too fine, this makes twilight hunting somewhat difficult. The 4-16x42 is a particularly bad offender, at 4x the reticle is so small and so fine it is very hard to see even in a bright day. They are usually OK when you have a torch and hunt at night. This and the above problem, I think, is the result of these manufactures not being able to test their scope and have no real life use experience with them. To be honest the reticle issues are the biggest reason I think they fail to live up to their potential. It is not a hard thing, and does not cost more money, to get right.
* Adjustments are relatively accurate, but not perfect. The most common error is when you make vertical adjustments there is a small amount of horizontal shift. ​Then again, you would not expect any sub-$1500 scope to be perfect anyway. A lot of people report Leupold Mark 4, VX5HD and VX6's adjustments are not accurate. the 5-20 Mil FFP I mentioned earlier seems to have very close to perfect adjustment.

I shoot a lot of 22LR, so I prefer spending under 400 dollars on scopes with these features than a big brand scope with 3-9 magnification, plaint duplex, and has no side focus (or any focus), or cannot focus under 25 meters (all Leupolds except for EFR models cannot focus under 50 meters). But make no mistake warranty is a big issue. if you use your rifles rough stick to big brands.