Leupold certainly has given silhouette shooters and handgun hunters a major
Christmas gift for this year. It has completely overhauled what is undoubtedly
the finest pistol scope on the planet making it even better.
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Leupold Makeover
- 2.5 X 8 Pistol Scope |
First of all, it has added
what every silhouette shooter has been asking for ever since the 2.5X8 was
first introduced to the marketplace i.e. finger adjustable click elevation
and windage adjustments. As you know, the original model use the traditional
Leupold friction type adjustments in which you placed a coin in a slot and
turned the mechanism to the appropriate setting. The adjustment was smooth
with no audible or tactile clicks to indicate the amount of movement being
cranked in. This system is ok if you’re setting the scope for only one
distance and you never intend to change the setting for the rest of your life.
However, for we competition shooters who shoot at four separate distances or
handgun hunters who shoot relatively low velocity loads with a revolver, it
was a less than perfect system.
We had two alternatives
available to work with this system. One, we could mark the correct settings
for the various distances on our scope with a pencil or felt tip and hope that
in the normal handling of the gun, the marks wouldn’t get rubbed off. Or we
could also scratch markings indicating the correct settings on the top of the
turret with a sharp awl. But if we changed our load later on, those settings
wouldn’t be valid any longer but the marks would still be there. Again, a less
than perfect situation. Besides, using reference marks, permanent or
otherwise, isn’t very precise, and if we didn’t turn the adjustment exactly
right, we could easily be off by a click or two from where we really wanted to
be.
The other alternative was to
send our scope off to Leupold and spend some extra bucks to have a target
elevation knob installed. This was the absolutely the best approach by far
when using the gun/scope combination for silhouette competition. However, if
we wanted to use that same gun and scope combo on a handgun hunt, that big
tall target turret could prevent the gun from being carried in a holster. It
could also act like a built in hook just waiting to get snagged on something
when moving through heavy brush. What we really needed was some built-in, low
profile, click adjustable target turrets, and that’s exactly what Leupold gave
us. Thank you, thank you!
Additionally, they’ve
completely revamped the optics. This scope is now part of the new VX -III line
and has the Index Matched Lens System - Leupold’s best. If you remember, I
discussed the Index Matched system when I reviewed Leupold’s excellent
15X30X50 spotting scope a couple of issues ago.
As you know, coatings are a prime contributor to a quality image. Among their
several functions, coatings are designed to eliminate reflection down to
almost undetectable levels. Light that is reflected away, is light that is
never going to reach your eye. Additionally, light that is scattered off of
the objective lens on the outside of the scope, and light that is scattered
around in the interior of the scope, is going to degrade our
image. Consequently, we want to be sure that we buy only scopes that have
coatings on both the internal lenses as well as the external lenses.
It’s not a well know
fact, but optical lenses can, and are made from several different types of
glass. In fact if you go to a glass catalog, you’ll find dozens and dozens of
optical glass types with all kinds of varying chemical compositions. As it
turns out, in order to optimize the efficiecy of any lens, the coatings for
that particular lens should be custom matched to it as well. That’s what the
Leupold Index Matched system is all about i.e. matching the coating to the
lens’s glass index of refraction and that’s determined by its chemical make
up. The result of this customization is a brighter, more pleasing image with
lots of good definition.
I’ve been working
with one of the new scopes for several weeks now, and I can definitely say
that the new system works. I can make this statement in spite of the fact that
most of the time that I was checking out the scope, California was
experiencing some of the worst Winter rain storms in its history. In spite of
that, I found that the images are clear and edgy with excellent color
fidelity. Resolution is also excellent with no fall off in resolution until
you get to the very extreme edge of the image. As far as distortion is
concerned, forget it. It doesn’t exist.
The bad weather also gave me an
opportunity to check out Leupold’s new Alumina scope filter kit in less than
ideal conditions. Man I’ll tell you when you screw on the yellow filter, it’s
like someone has turned on the lights in a dark room. Everything becomes much
brighter and blacks become super black - including the crosshairs. It was a
heck of a lot easier to see the targets with the filter. If you don’t have one
of these kits for your Leupold scope, you’re missing a very important boat. If
your Leupold scope is an older model that doesn’t have screw threads on the
front, send it off to Leupold and they’ll put them on for a reasonable
fee. You need these filters.
A quick note of information
- as you may know, the standard practice of all manufacturers is to set the parallelax of center fire scopes not equipped with an adjustable objective
lens at 100 yards. This includes pistol scopes. Consequently, just like with
the previous Leupold 2.5x8 model, you won’t be able to use the 8X setting and
get an in focus image at less than that distance. But of course, you really
don’t need the full magnification power of the scope at the closer distances
for shooting either the full sized or even the 22 targets. I found that if I
cranked down the power to around 5X or 6X, all targets at 25, 50, and 75 yards
were perfectly focused. It was when I was working at 100 yards and beyond,
that the 8X capability of the scope could come into play. However, if you feel
that you need that 8X for the close-ups, no problem. Leupold can adjust the
parallelax of your scope to what ever distance that you specify for a small
fee.
So hats off to Leupold for giving us target shooters and handgun hunters what
we’ve been needing in the way of precise click adjustments and then as a
bonus, throwing in a set of even better optics than we had before. What a
great deal!
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