Also, purely as an engineering function, as magnification increases, field of view decreases, so rapid target acquisition becomes more difficult. Image is magnified, but so are tremors and wobbles-and mirage and heat waves. In field shooting, the extreme magnification so available today has warts. However, I’ve seen few situations where shorter shots can be ruled out-and for sure, I’ve never backed up to take a shot at game! Today, with perfect knowledge of range and bigger/better optics, we probably do this more often. Even back in those innocent pre-rangefinder days we took occasional quarter-mile shots with our fixed low-power scopes. These scopes are still “useable,” but nothing like the clarity of image we commonly get today! Today’s coatings are much better, and glass is probably better, too.Īll things being equal, wouldn’t a larger image be better? Sure, if you absolutely knew you were going to shoot at distance! I love to ring steel way out there-knowing you can is a marvelous confidence-builder-but I am very much not an extreme-range shooter on game. Regrettably, I don’t have any of those scopes today to compare, but I have Batten’s 2.75X Redfield, and a vintage 4X Redfield that came on a Savage 99. In the 60s and 70s I had fixed 4X Redfield, Unertl, and Weaver scopes, and a bit later I had a 3X Leupold. I’m as guilty as my colleagues, but I like magnification! I got a 3-9X variable in 1976, and I loved it! The larger image made precise shot placement easier, and I’m not ashamed to say that I often turned it up all the way! So, what is meant by “magnification is overrated?”įirst, clarity of image is more important. Every now and then one or another of us will get reactionary, echo O’Connor, and say, “All you need is a fixed 4X.” In an odd coincidence, at least a half-dozen of today’s better-known gunwriters are almost exactly the same age, mid-60s. Variable-power scopes had long been perfected, but Batten apparently found his low-power scope adequate! John used the rifle through the ‘80s, including a lot of mountain game. The rifle has a Griffin & Howe side mount, and in the mount is a fixed 2.75X Redfield scope. On this rifle, he hedged his bets the rear receiver bridge carries an aperture base, and the sight resides in a trap in the steel buttplate. John shot the first of his many sheep in the ‘30s using aperture sights. 300 Winchester Magnum in 1963, so the rifle was probably built around 1960. 30-.338 was most popular between the introductions of the. 30-.338 on a Mauser action, nicely-shaped stock in laminate wood. I have the rifle John described as “his favorite hunting rifle.” Batten hunted widely in North America-and much of the rest of the world. Batten (1912-1989) was another hero and long-time leader of our Boone and Crockett Club. Well, in the 1970s that’s pretty much all we had, but we didn’t do so badly. Guys that I respected, like Jack O’Connor, told us that a fixed 4X was really all we needed for big-game hunting. When I was a kid, high-magnification scopes existed, but we thought of them as target and varmint scopes. At a new product seminar last August, Zeiss’s Kyle Brown pointed out a great truth that’s worth pondering: “Magnification is overrated!” Riflescopes are getting more powerful-with good, clear optics and repeatable adjustments-and they’re also getting bigger and heavier.
Today’s extended zoom capability offers incredible versatility, a far cry from the fixed 4X scopes I started with! Actual image size at “X” power can vary among manufacturers, but if you take popular magnification levels such as 1.75-5X, 2-7X, 3.5-10X, 4.5-14X, 6-18X, and so forth, we’re still talking “three-times-zoom.” Boy has that changed! Four-times-zoom seemed a breakthrough…then came five-times-zoom, then six…and some manufacturers now have eight-times-zoom. The classic example is the popular and versatile 3-9X. Reliable variables have been with us since the 1970s, but for many years the practical limit was about “three-times-zoom.” I’m a child of the scope era, but when I started hunting, we used fixed-power scopes because variable-power scopes weren’t yet perfected: shifts in point of impact were normal with changes in magnification. Optics have improved dramatically during my career. 300 Winchester Magnum with Leupold VX-6 3-18X he had the scope somewhere on a medium power setting. Excerpt from Summer 2019 issue of Fair Chase Close shots can never be ruled out! Boddington’s Dall’s ram went down at 122 yards.
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