Done with vortex

[LRRPF52]

That sucks big time when that happens. I’ve watched some of the top competitors break their scopes in matches and they were not happy. That includes Hensoldt, Zeiss, Leupold, Schmidt, Vortex, and some others, almost always from a bump and a fall on the elevation or windage turrets.

I broke the parallax on a Schmidt & Bender PM II 5-25x56 doing precision testing for a rifle manufacturer back sometime between 2008-2010. Whole image went cloudy, which was not cool. That was just from shooting, but that scope had been migrated in between so many .308s, .300 Win Mags, and .338 Lapua Magnums that it didn’t really surprise anyone. Not sure what the round count on it was, but it had been through a lot.

For Vortex, I wouldn’t buy anything other than Viper PST Gen II or Razor series if it was for regular competition, since those have the epoxied optical modules that can take a beating and not fail.

My Gen I PSTs have held up amazingly-well though. Tracking and repeatability have been great. I think I got my first Vortex in 2009, which was just a Viper 6.5-20x44 Mil Dot just to see what the company was like before the PSTs came out.

Here are the top scopes in PRS and NRL as of 2018:

On the chart above, the various colors represent where a shooter landed in terms of rank. For example, the black color indicates shooters who finished in the top 10 in the PRS, the darkest blue is people who finished 11-25 in the PRS, and the lighter the blue, the lower they finished in overall standings. The green colors represents the top shooters in the NRL, where the darkest green is the top 10, medium green is 11-25, and light green are the shooters who’s season rank landed from 26th to 50th. The legend on the chart shows the league and ranks each color represents, but basically the darker the color, the higher up the shooters placed.

Good article on it rom PRS Blog

One company who I have not personally seen break yet is NigthForce, though I know of a few people that have issues. They are the gold standard in reliability, durability, but many also complain about their glass quality not being as bright and crisp as Schmidts, Kahles, Leica, Hensoldt, etc. The ATACR 7-35x56 F1 is $3600.


Kahles K25i 5-25×56 is special order at $3750.

Vortex Razor HD Gen 3 6-36x56 is only $3000.

If those are too steep, I really like the Vortex Viper PST Gen II 3-15x44 on sale right now for $898.

If you try to run the lower price point optics with variable power and parallax and shoot a lot, they will typically fail on you, especially on a gas gun.

They’re great for guys who never shoot, but want to slap something on to zero and take through hunting season with a tag or two, but aren’t for the serious shooter like you (which I think you already know).

If you do stay with Vortex, ask them for replacement value and a Gen II PST instead. I wouldn’t mess with any of their lower price point tubes for what you’re doing.