$500 will buy you a lot of great optics for your rifle, so you should find one that pushes your buttons and buy it.
All your other scopes are Swaros??? Why the small budget for this one? Pretty hard to look through $1500 euro glass and then be happy with $500 asian stuff.
The marketplace has changed, consumers want bulletproof warranties now. Who has ever needed one? They come with a price tag. Vortex doesn't make scopes, they contract their glass out, Chicoms or Taiwan or Phillipines (I'm guessing) on the cheap end to Japanese on the high end. Nikon's lousy customer service nearly cost them their riflescope business ten years ago. They learned their lesson and are easy to deal with now. Their glass has always been bright though. Vortex had a large part in consumers starting to demand brainless warranties. Smart marketing and look where it's gotten them, lots of brand loyalty now. Nearly every maker now follows the same pattern, $200 gets you a serviceable Phillipine made product, $500 buys you all you could ever need in Japanese glass, and $1000+ buys you bragging rights on glass built by former Euro commies who saw the errors of their ways and embraced the western markets.
I carry my guns and shoot from field positions not concrete benches so I like a rifle that weighs between 6-8 lbs depending on how much it kicks. Army and Marine snipers have been killing bad guys at 1200 yards with 10x scopes for fifty years, so do we need 16x to kill deer at 400??? Nikon, Burris, Vortex, Zeiss, Meopta, yada, yada, yada, are consistently heavier relative to power than Leupolds. Do some comparisons if you want to save weight on your rifle. If Hubble scopes appeal to you, there are lots of them on the marketplace. Quality lightweight scopes, one needs to do some shopping. Leupys may not be the brightest, nor the quickest to come out with new gismos and features, but they are consistently lighter than nearly all other comparable scopes. If I'm going to run a 3-9x36 scope, it's going to be an 11 oz Leupy not a 17 oz, Vortex. I own four 2.5-8x36, three 1.75-6x32 and half a dozen 1.5-5x20 Leupolds. I have a 2.5-8x36 on a .243 walking varminter. The scope is equipped with the Leupold custom yardage zero stop dial that gives me one turn of the turret from 200-750 yards. I don't always hit soda cans at 700 yards with this setup but that 8x scope sure as heck lets me see the can just fine.
I like dead nuts reliable lightweight scopes with good glass for a reasonable price. I own Burris, Kahles, Zeiss, Nikon and a raft of other scopes, and I'm happy with most of them, but if I had to pick one brand over all others for a "hunting" rifle, it would be Leupolds.
I compare Leupold to Honda motorcycle. Honda chooses not to play marketing leap frog with Kawi, Yamaha, et. al. every model year. Instead they find something that works and they stick with it for a while. Some folks hate that about Honda, I love it. It's what I like about Leupold. Probably my next scope will be another VX3 2.5-8x36.
