I bought my Christmas present a little early this year: a new scope for my long distance rifle. I'd been using a Premier 5x25 scope that a (very good!) friend had loaned me early in the year. (Everyone should have as good a friend—I highly recommend it.) It's a darn fine scope, but I couldn't keep borrowing it forever, and as the months passed I felt increasing pressure, wholly self-generated, to buy my own scope.
I'd been saving for a Schmidt & Bender PM II, which regularly receives top marks for everything, including price. Which was why I'd been saving for so long. But at last month's match I got to look through both the Schmidt & Bender and another scope I'd been keeping an eye on: Kahles' 624i. Kahles is a sister company to Swarovski, who make probably the best hunting scopes and binoculars, and they've worked with Desert Tech (the people who made my rifle) on a new reticle that's just outstanding.
And, as luck would have it, one of the club members is the owner of CS Tactical, a company that sells many fine brands of scopes. He brought a few of the latest and greatest scopes for folks to look through, including the Kahles 624i with the new AMR reticle.
It was an easy sale.
So this morning I headed up to the local range and sighted-in my new Kahles scope. Twice. The first time I got done and was pretty satisfied, but as I started shooting at the steel plates 950 yards away and most of the way up one of the surrounding hills, I quickly ran out of room in the eyebox (that maddeningly small range away from the scope where you need to put your eyeball so that the image doesn't have any shadows around the edges). I'd already noticed that I was at the very edge of the eyebox when in the prone position, so I decided it was time to do it right and move the scope forward a notch to position it better. Which meant I had to re-zero it. Again.
Fortunately it only ended up a few clicks low, so it was pretty simple to get it re-zeroed and then bang away on a few more plates before heading home. My only complaint is that the tick marks on the turret knobs are so close together that it becomes quite fiddly to get them perfectly aligned with the marker on the turret body when you're resetting the zero point. However, that's a one-time job and otherwise I'm quite satisfied with how the scope worked so far. I look forward to using it at the next match!
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