Beer Hunter wrote:I'm not so sure. Not once have I looked through a Leupold scope and thought -wow that's nice.
They are always competent, but nothing more.
Have a look on page 62 of this months "Sporting Rifle" - Leupold quality is all over the place. Look on page 61 and you see Bushnell 4200's significantly beating Leupold and Swarovski.
Nothing, but nothing beats comparing scopes with your own eyes - and doing a box test
Kev.
I don't think looking through a scope is a profound test of its ultimate quality. Sure, it's very important, and you can usually tell at once if something is positively duff, or unusually good; otherwise, a very careful side-by-side comparison of different scopes would be necessary for this to be menaingful, along with bench tests with collimators, and it would need to be done by someone very experienced too. A scope is far more than its bits of optical glass: materials, machining tolerances, seals, design, assembly, QC, and of course after-sales service and tech support.
It's on all these counts that Leupold has built a massive reputation in the USA - and I know nothing of "Sporting Rifle " magazine (never heard of it in fact) but I suspect it's Brit, and I don't know the qualifications of its testers to make judgements about scopes. AFAIC Leupold is very, very
consistent - and that quality is worth its weight in gold. Bushnells might indeed be pretty good - but that would be some Bushnell models, at certain stages in their very mixed, complicated marketing & manufacturing history, and very likely also just some batches that experienced unusually rigorous QC.... Even with those qualifications, one would still wonder what kind of after-sales service you might get on a Bushnell scope ten years down the line...
Sorry, but even though I'd be very happy to try one of these Bushnells myself, and I might like it, there is no way Bushnell is on a par with Leupold or Swarovski, and if this Sporting Rifle thingy suggests otherwise I'd have to say they're bonkers.
Regards, Malcolm