Today's Inexpensive Scopes Impress With Performance And Features
There has never been a better time to be an outdoorsman in the market for new gear. Increased worldwide competition and revolutions in manufacturing techniques have led to today's products being the best and most cost efficient ever. Hunters, fishermen, and other outdoors lovers of all types and budgets have benefited from these developments and can now enjoy higher-quality and less-expensive products as a result. Those in the market for cheap hunting optics, for example, have never had it better. Bad Glass is Becoming a Thing of the Past Buying a low-end scope once meant trying to juggle compromises, seeking to find the model that would drag one down the least once in the field or go to site. Making high quality lenses is difficult work, requiring great precision under tightly controlled manufacturing conditions, so that lower-end products often understandably stood well below their more expensive counterparts when it came to the quality of their optics. This is no longer true to nearly as great of an extent as it once was. Relatively inexpensive, computer-controlled lens-making machines have revolutionized the field of optics production, and lenses that would have commanded top dollar only twenty years ago can now be had for very reasonable prices. Manufacturers of budget-level scopes have taken advantage of this opportunity, scooping up these nearly flawless commodity lenses for use in their products, and hunters and target shooters have benefited greatly from their initiative. Low-end scopes were once known for delivering capable performance under ideal conditions, but degrading quickly in that respect when things became more difficult. Some long-time observers of the industry used to be prone to suggesting that some manufacturers of less expensive scopes focused their efforts on producing accessories which would seem to perform well in the showroom and at its associated range, but that is no longer the case. Armed with these high-quality lenses produced by third parties, manufacturers of less-expensive scopes can now boast of real performance under a great variety of conditions, instead. Buying a scope in this price range used to mean settling for an image which became blurrier the further from the center of the lens it strayed, but this is no longer nearly as much of an issue. These modern commodity lenses deliver excellent edge-to-edge clarity, even sometimes eclipsing the performance in this respect of lenses which were considered the top of the line only a decade ago. Lens quality of this sort also translates almost directly to better low-light performance, an improvement which once again addresses a traditional weakness of optics in this price range. Paying Less Doesn't Mean Skimping on Features Manufacturers of these starter- and lower-budget oriented scopes also used to try to deliver as little in the way of frills as possible in an effort to keep their costs down. This often meant scopes, for example, which lacked when it came to waterproofing, so that they would be more prone to fogging up due to internal condensation than better-made equivalents. It could also mean scopes which were fitted with inferior adjusting mechanisms, so that a cheaper scope, despite having been dialed in for range precisely, would become gradually less accurate as a day went on. Again, weaknesses of this sort are largely a thing of the past. Expensive, high-end scopes will outperform their more pedestrian relatives in these respects, but by far less than was once the case. It is easy to find inexpensive scopes today which are fitted with heavy-duty, high-quality mounting, waterproofing, and other hardware, and which are balanced very precisely as they are manufactured in modern factories. Even proprietary lens coatings which were once selling points for the manufacturers of high-end scopes today often have commodity equivalents, so that what often sets off a more expensive scope from one that is more budget-friendly amounts to little more than marketing speak. While the prices of the most expensive scopes still allow their manufacturers room to justify them, the gap to less expensive has closed to an extent that no hunter needs to feel handicapped by his budget.Sources
- http://www.leupold.com/hunting-shooting/scopes/
- http://www.leupold.com/hunting-shooting/scopes/
- http://www.opticsplanet.com/howto/how-to-choose-a-riflescope.html
- http://www.opticsplanet.com/howto/how-to-choose-a-riflescope.html
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