A crashed hard drive and another review has caused me to be delayed in providing more information on the 3 LPVO's that I had in hand last April. In December I ordered the Vortex Razor Gen III 1-10x24 in MOA BDC and after what seemed like forever it finally arrived in April. I bought my DT MDRx 7.62 in March after selling my Sig 716 G2 to get something more compact and wanted a nice optic to complement the MDRx. Originally it was just going to be the Gen III and the March Shorty, but ATI announced their new SAI 6 and I really liked the reticle design. For many years I have been a proponent of mrad based reticles and have turned my nose at BDC styles but for an LPVO and the desire for a system to be "quick" I decided to return to this feature to see if I could make it work... for me and my specific platform. For those who may not be aware, ATI is the parent company of Tangent Theta in Canada, but the SAI series are not part of TT's lineup and instead ATI decided to use a Japanese OEM to produce their new LPVO. The fact that the best LPVO scopes are of Japanese manufacturer makes sense for ATI's first foray into this market.
Unlike most of my reviews of long range scopes, I am not doing my typical full optical review, instead this is more of an evaluation of what I like or do not like about each scope and then there will be a few pages of through the scope reticle images (please pay attention to the notes).
If "short" is your forte, it's pretty clear which scope wins that challenge, but what is surprising is how compact Vortex kept their 1-10x24 as it is essentially the same size as the 1-6 scope. SAI uses a 30mm tube while the Vortex has the larger 34mm tube and while March's tube is 30mm there is no space to mount in front of the turret housing and March is using a 33mm diameter bell which will require a special mount. Audere (a specialized manufacturer in Italy) happens to make a mount and March has assured me they objective bell is strong enough for this mount. If you'd rather not use this style mount, some have used Aimpoint Pro mounts like the one from Scalarworks, but I put up two of my ARC M10 rings and they will both fit behind the turret housing as the picture below shows.
Some other features to point out is color, March is traditional black and Vortex is their typical anodization they've used with other Razor series scopes, a color that matches... well, nothing. Still not sure why Vortex chose this color to begin with, I assume to be different and so other shooters can quickly identify who has a Razor. For many it is not an issue but for others it is. ATI went with an anodization that is much closer to FDE and may be more aesthetically pleasing to some vs. the Vortex.
Here's how the scopes setup on my MDRx
Ignore the mount, it was my only 34mm mount at the time but clearly this would need a cantilever mount if I had kept the Vortex
TURRETS
Let's talk about the turrets. For many, a BDC reticle means you are not going to be fiddling with turrets and dialing elevation or wind, this is, after all, what the reticle is designed for. Both the Vortex and the SAI have fixed parallax set at 150 yards for the Vortex and 110 meters for the SAI, while the March is one of the few LPVO designs out that offer's an adjustable parallax. When it comes to illumination both the Vortex and SAI use a more traditional dial with on/off settings between each brightness level while March uses a push button design to scroll through the different settings.
If you ever do plan to use your LPVO as more of a long range scope, the fact that the March is the only one that offers exposed turrets (with very nice clicks I might add) and the adjustable parallax will probably sway you in that direction. Vortex has capped turrets that are extremely low profile but with the caps removed are very easy to turn like a traditional turret. Now we come to the SAI's turrets and once you unscrew the caps there is a big "what were you thinking?" moment, not only are the turrets tiny, the only way to adjust them are to use the little bump at the top which requires your thumb and index finger. As a set it and forget it scope, you probably won't care, but if you ever intend to "dial" this scope you may be in for a challenge. My recommendation with the SAI 6 is to zero it and don't ever remove those caps again. Both March and SAI offer flip caps, the SAI has the excellent Tenebraex caps and March has their own branded caps which are nice but not Tenebraex nice. Vortex only offers cheap caps that quickly get lost.
Below are specs on the scopes
RETICLE
So why the SAI 6 when it's only a 1-6, to be honest it was the reticle, I really liked their outside the box thinking with the design and especially for quick short range work without illumination, while most manufacturers opt for a horseshoe style SAI went with four bullets that point toward center. I need a lot more time with the scope but I think it's going to be a benefit for sure and I really like the fact that their BDC goes out to 800 meters, which brings us to the Vortex and the EBR-9 MOA BDC reticle which was clearly designed for 5.56 work as it only goes out to 600 yards, if you intend to go further than 600 I highly recommend the EBR-9 mrad reticle which is a very well thought out reticle, but for 600 and in the Vortex design has the traditional LPVO BDC reticle features but with a different style illuminated quadrant (more on that later). At first glance it appears March is using a standard mil hash reticle but in reality they are using a dual focal plane design, the center (illuminated) dot and the main crosshair stadia are in the second focal plan while all the mrad hash marks are in the FFP, that being said the March is not a Christmas tree design and I wish it was but it doesn't sound like that will be an option with dual focal plane, I think we will end up seeing a tree but it will be FFP only.
ILLUMINATION
Outside of the reticle, illumination may command the most attention feature wise and in this category Vortex hit a home run, their illumination module and reticle etching is the best I've seen, if you prefer how bright RDS sights are then you'll be pleasantly surprised with the Gen III, their illumination is nuclear bright and at the highest setting is really too bright even in full sunlight, I turned my down a few notches and felt it was more than adequate. While March and SAI are not nearly as bright as the Vortex they are what I would call "daylight bright" meaning that you can see the illumination in full sunlight. ATI decided to illuminate the full center cross but not the wind dots, while March chose to only illuminate the center dot and nothing else. While March is not really known for their bright reticles (something they could improve upon) the center dot in the DR-1 reticle is surprisingly bright. If your intended purpose for an LPVO is to shoot mostly at 1x then Vortex has the advantage with the brightest dot in the business, SAI's CX9001 reticle with the four bullets pointing to center are another big advantage when using low magnification as the brightness of illumination doesn't quite cut it for me (at 1x). At 1x the March's center dot illumination is visible.
DISTANCE
In other threads I have seen some chatter about how well these scopes do at distance, especially with the fixed parallax and I found mixed results. After playing with the diopters on each scope and trying to get them dialed in just right to my eye, I aimed the scopes from 100 yards out to 1000 and what I found may surprise you. I found the SAI 6 to have better IQ at distance than the Vortex, even though Vortex has a fixed 150 yd parallax and the SAI 6 has it fixed at 110 meters, but for whatever reason the image through the SAI 6 always look more "pleasing" than the image from the Vortex. I am not saying the Vortex was bad or unusable, I would have no issues with taking a shot at distance with the Vortex as it was very nice on it's own, but when compared side by side with the SAI 6 and March, I did feel those scopes had an edge. The overall optical winner was the March, both near and far the optics in the March held more detail, more contrast and provided that Pop that anyone familiar with alpha glass is used to, but the March is over double the price of the SAI 6 and almost $1k more than the Vortex (if you know where to shop for Vortex), so one would hope that when spending that kind of money it gets you something and indeed it does.
March has really been upping their game lately with short scope designs that perform very well (something that is difficult to do). Kudos to Vortex for their brilliant illumination and shaking things up with a very capable 1-10 design. And brilliant move from ATI by introducing a budget conscience scope that takes the tried and true 1-6 design and improves upon it with a cleverly designed reticle.
In the next couple posts are the through the scope images, please keep in mind these are meant for giving you an idea of what the reticle and illumination look like at different magnifications, please do not use these as an idea of IQ. Also, in some of the images you will notice that the reticle starts to blur towards the periphery of the sigh picture, keep in mind we are using an optical system which has it's own issues taking images through another optical system. While some blurriness was noted during testing, it was not as bad as the images show and I found all these scopes gave an acceptable level of IQ both for the reticle and for the test targets.
All images were taken with a Nikon Z6 DSLR with 24-70 f/4 lens set to 28mm. I used manual exposure mode and fixed ISO to ensure the camera did not adjust, with each scope you will begin to notice some brightness falloff as the magnification gets larger, this was barely noticeable to the naked eye because of our eyes ability to compensate for varying light levels, also the sky was overcast mostly and light was changing but I was doing the best I could to get all images shot within a reasonable amount of time. What I found was that illumination was brighter to my naked eye than it appears my camera (sensor) was able to pick up so keep that in mind, illumination appeared brighter than these images show.
