Thread: Price points in centrefire hunting scopes

Hunters have quite different requirements from a scope than target shooters and typical differences are light gathering and reticle thickness for hunting along with weight.
It is a bit of a conundrum these days for a hunter selecting a scope; viz:- do I need to dial up and adjust for parallax and windage? Many of the marketing and magazine gurus and retailers push tjose barrows very convincingly and of cpurse the more bells and whistles attached equate to more $$ (and more to go wrong)
Here's the thing; in my experience, even if you have a sub 1moa hunting rifle, while you may be able to put a group inside 1moa at 300 or even 500 metres (150 mm group) field precision is vastly more challenging and that group would likely expand to 2+ moa (@500 m = 30 cm)
In reality a 300 m shot at an animals vitals is a very long way to achieve ethically with certainty.
Following that premise the question then becomes ; "what scope will do the job well at 300 m well?
The fact is, that for all commonly used deer hunting cartidges like 303, 308, 270, 3006, 243,7mm etc a 200m zero will allow easy holdovrr and hold under out to 300m and beyond without the need for dialing. At 300 m a simple hold on top of shoulder will drop one into the vitals and a hold point at lower chest from 100 m will do the same.
When it come to wind , a pretty strong crosswind even at 300m will .ove your bullet about 15cm so easy to hold off without dialing.
At the end of the day the light gathering comes down to objective lens diametrr in mm divided by magnification power. Viz: 42mm ÷ 7X = a light factor of 7, which is the maximum a human eye van utilise. If that 42mm scope is screwed up to 14X the light factor drops to only 3, and you wont see much of a deer in the twilight.
Next question is to consider how much magnification you really need in order to hit a 150mm target at 500 m? The fact is that 3X would be enough but 10 X would make it very easy but in twilight with a 42 mm objective anything more than 6X would didadvantage your visibility. Hence the popularity of fixed 6x by 42 and 8x by 56 scopes in europe for decades.
Thus a good quality 3-10*40 scope with capped turrets will meet almost every hunting requirement in NZ. A small firedot of adjustable light intensity is a useful addition. All the other bells and whistles along with the extra$$ costs are likely not needed by most hunters.