Buying the best hunting scope is not a simple thing to do for beginner, or even professional hunters. Walking in to a gun store, seeing for the best one between hundreds kinds of equipments and starting to get confusion.
In this article, we are going to show you how to understand more about a scope, then you can confidently choose the best scope that most suit your needs.
How to read scope:
First, you need to know what the standard format of the scope is, they are: magnification, and the diameter of the lens.
There is an “x” in the middle of these two standard formats to separate them and help you to look at them easier. The magnification indicates when you look through the scope, how many times an image can become larger.There are two numbers with a dash in the middle to show the magnification, and the level of magnification is not fixed, it ranges from low to high. And, the diameter of the lens is measured in milimeters.
Optical Power
There are a lot of magnification levels; you need to choose the suitable one depending on your hunting purpose. As a hunter, you may want a scope from 16x to 32x. However, lower magnification will help to have faster shooting. Higher magnification helps to have good resolution of the target, but it will be bigger and heavier, it is also having higher costs and may be more difficult to use.
Size
After choosing the suitable magnification level, the next step would be choosing the right objective size of lens.
Once you have determined how much magnification you need you’ll then have to settle on an objective lens size.
The objective lens is used to transmit the surrounding light, this help you to focus on an object. The bigger the len is, the more light can be trasmitted to your eye. As a result, you can have a clearer image.
Reticle
Reticle is just a simple cross, but it is one of the most important features of a scope to target an object. There are various patterns of reticle available in the stores, from simple to complex patterns. For example, the most common and basic one is Duplex reticle, the more powerful upgrade is Mildot reticle, and what is most popular today is BDC reticle, which is Bullet Drop Compensator. You can ask a shop assistant to have detailed information about each of them.
