heres what happens: if you go for bright illumination that clearly shows during the day, you generally get a little bit of fuzziness from the bright illumination which messes with the shooter's eyes. the goal is to use as little illumination as possible to keep the lines sharp, but to also provide the ability to shoot in low light situations. its not a design flaw or anything, its the physics of illumination. you simply can't make something that bright and not have the fuzziness factor play a role on the lines. this is why the cheap scopes like ncstar and stuff have very bright illumination settings and also crappy glass and reticles.

Quote Originally Posted by k2peaker View Post
Looking at the SHOT samples of the 1-8x ShortDot and the 1-8x Premier, those really may be category gold standards. I still wonder how much of a market in 3-gun given the price point though. Funny that both were announced at SHOT 2010 and both are not to production yet.

Daytime Illumination:
I hear ya on that one. I've resigned myself to the fact that most of the tactically oriented scope companies just don't understand what it is that we want. They can't help but think of illumination for night/low light situations only and can't get their minds wrapped around us 3-gunners running around in bright western sun, wanting bright red (or green) illumination in the middle of the day. I don't know, maybe it is a more difficult design trade off than I realize. FWIW, I have the same problem with my USO. I've just learned to lower my expectations and get used to a black reticle. On some of the shaded, low contrast targets I'll usually turn it on and it occasionally helps.

By the way, the early reviews that I've been reading on the Viper PSTs on SnipersHide sound encouraging. May be a category killer. Go Vortex!