Thread: Shooting distance without parralax adjustment

Originally Posted by Bagheera

If you've already got a scope you want to check out then you can do it yourself.
Set your rifle firmly in sandbags or bipod and lined up on a target.
Without touching the rifle or scope or stock anywhere, look at the target then move your eye around till you can only just see through the edge of the lens. How much does the crosshair move on the target ? You can't do this from your shooting position welding cheek on stock because any small head movement will push the rifle a little.

If you're already using the scope and can hit targets at 600m then there might not be much problem. Try firing a few shots say at 100, 300 and 600m with eye a moderate distance off center, perhaps a bit more error than you might expect under pressure in a awkward position. Please report back !

Most longer range fixed parallax scopes are actually set to 300m, which I guess isn't that far from practical infinity. My VX1 is only 70m, which is actually a good distance for a lot of shooting.

I've got this idea that a bigger objective gives more parallax error - does anyone else agree ? So with a 2-7x32 it's negligible. At 3-9x40 it's also pretty manageable but at x50mm or x56 it starts to be a problem. Another indication is that virtually no scopes under 12x have parallax adjustments. I guess you might want more than 10x for 600m unless you're just shooting gongs.

I am not sure about objective sizes but I do know that the higher the magnification, the more parallax comes into play. I have noticed that most larger objective scopes such as the 50 and 56mm tend to be higher magnification as well.