Thread: Chinese Brand Scopes

I know, I know.... Conventional wisdom would say they are usually shit. I agree, but things are not always set in stones, and the Chinese has been trying to better their game. Over the last several years, it has became apparent that Chinese can make decent lens elements with decent coating. By decent I do not mean they match premium grade German or even premium Japanese, but I mean mid grade stuff, which is what most of us use anyway. The weakness of Chinese made optical gear has been the durability and precision in the mechanical parts. There are currently at least one really good brand Chinese binocular, they specialise in parro design and they are so good that they pretty much dethroned Fiji, I digress.

The weakness in Chinese brand rifle scopes are, in order of importance:
1, unreliable internals that do not withstand hard use,
2, completely inaccurate therefore unreliable dials, and
3, outdated or poorly implemented reticles.

One of the reasons contributing to the Chinese brand scopes' tendency have these shortfalls, I think, is that China has the most strict weapon restriction in the world. not even 177 lead pellet guns are permitted. So unless the manufacture receives design specs from a foreign company, it is difficult for them to properly test their product to know how far to engineer them. Again, I digress as that is not the point of this thread.

I was browsing Aliexpress for scope rings with built in MOA (which is another can of worm but let's deal with that in a different thread), and naturally I saw a huge range of scopes. while most of them were unbranded, a few appear to be branded. what caught my attention is T-Eagle SR 10X44 SFSS. it is about 140 USD. T-eagal is the brand and even has its own website. The English version is super bad, appears to have been translated by something that is worse than Google Translate ( by that I mean, Google would have done a better job translating!!). But bad website aside, it would appear:

• there are some real design and production effort put into these scopes
• this scope appears to mimic SFWA 10x42 in terms of product positioning.
• quite a lot of good features: modern recticle, side focus, 1/10 mill dial, pull and push knob, nitrigeon filled, waterproof, flip caps
• the way the specs are listed looks like they try to do a good job, and seems to be doing a better than average job
• I actually like the tacky red parts :0

They even go through the effort of putting up several videos explaining their products (unfortunately all in Chinese), which is quite unusual for a brand with exactly zero name power. it shows that they are trying to do better than average aliexpress scope makers.

I am actually intrigued. But when I looked for reviews I cannot find any outside aliexpress. I have always fancied a SFWA 20x HD, but that scope is quite expensive and not sold outside USA. Its lower-end non-HD brother also looks pretty good but again USA only. This scope is not 20x but for its price, if it delivers on the features then it may well be a good scope for mid and low end rifles. This brand has a 2-16 model, apparently uses ED glass, also quite interesting.

If anyone has tried t-eagal scope, please let me know what you think, does it suck? is it all just a illusion?