Honestly, I find if I look through a bunch of riflescopes from $100 to $5000 outdoors, I tend to value “good” glass cost way less than “good” mechanicals. I’m not saying I know how to really define good glass.
I do know i had a Weaver K4….I thought it was a fine scope and killed deer as far as 350 yards with it just fine. It seemed to have a good image to me in most hunting situations. Next I tried some low end Bushnell which was fine.
Later I bought the best USA scope I could afford. A Burris XTR 3-12x. It had a pretty good image. Later I bought the XTR2. I was disappointed with the image quality above 12x.
Mind you everytime I bought a scope, I looked through 20 plus scopes in a store or at the range.
All this said, I’ve looked through or handled cheap and expensive scopes that flopped managing CA. The confusing thing is CA and other issues can be managed fairly well with good lens design without fancy words like HD, ED, UHD, etc. Leupold does a good job in delivering a good image without throwing a bunch of hashtags on it. Scopes like the Vortex Viper HS 4-16x have good balanced glass, imo….although they may struggle with mechanicals a bit.
I have a Tract Toric 4-20x that seems similar to the Nightforce I’ve looked through, but Nightforce has a solid reputation for being incredibly reliable after being dropped.
I guess what im trying to say is figure out what you want mechanically….identify those scopes. Then identify which ones have the reticle you want/can live with. That should narrow you down to about 5 scopes. You maybe able to test, but likely you have to buy them to really look through them. They may be returnable…not sure. In the end, there are a lot of $1000-$1500 scopes……I’m sure the $3000 -$5000 scopes are nice, but the look through them never justifies the price to me.
Actually, some of the $300-$650 Vortex scopes I’ve looked through were as good as anything else I’ve looked through.
A few weeks ago, I was comparing the reticle in a NF ATACR vs my TT and Vortex PST G2….the NF was better, I guess, but I couldn’t really see dropping another $2500….to my eye, it just doesn’t matter that much.
People don’t like when I post things like this, but I killed a lot of game with that Weaver K4 on a 1917. I could hit an moa target at 100yds with factory core lokts with little trouble…..and see it!
IME, the first $300-$500 over a $100 scope can buy a lot or improvement for me. It is like night and day! The next $500-$1000 is probably worth spending if I have it. After that, I can only really see spending the money to get NF durability….. otherwise…..I’m not really seeing much value. That’s me. You have to decide if you see value. Maybe I’m blind…I don’t think so…