The razor or the Steiner, the razor is a heavy pig though. I have not had the 3-18 steiner, but I have the Razor Gen 2 3-18 and 4-27, Steiner T6xi 5-30, XTR III and XTR Pro in 5-30, Razor 3 in 6-36, and a few PST 2's. The steiner turrets are more tactical, lower profile etc. where I'd say the XTR III/Pro/Razor are more PRS/competition orientated.
I'm not a fan of 18x, for me I'd much rather have the top end and give up a couple power down low, in an optic that's basically the same size/weight/cost. However, if you have to have 3x I get it. Also optically most of the 25x+ optics are going to be better at 15-18x than an 18x scope at max. Also to be very clear up front, there are much more important things about scopes than just optical performance, but the issue is you can't really test most of them easily, durability for one unless you start destroying them, even tracking is hard because it varies from sample to sample and manufacturers put pressure on anyone that tries to report tracking (There's a SH article somewhere that they had tracking results from their classes for optics, but they stopped doing it because of manufacturer pressure to not report it). So optics is the easy one to eval.
I can't say for the Steiner 3-18, but having used the T6xi 5-30, XTR Pro and III 5-30, side by side on the same days, the one thing I'd say about the burris/steiner scopes is color wise they seem pretty flat to me, almost washed out/hazy esp. at the top end of their magnification. Also they all have significant fall off in quality from about 22x-up, and suffer from pretty bad chromatic abberation at higher powers. Useable......absolutely, but the difference between 20x,25x,30x is much larger than I'm used to in other optics. I can't ever imagine wanting to run a XTR III at 30x. Even the XTR Pro and T6xi to me are noticeably worse at their max power than the Gen 2 razor is.
What really shocked me is I recently compared my XTR 3 to my old PST II 5-25x partly because I was thinking about swapping a couple out for XTR IIIs. At 15x and 20x they were basically equal, I'd give the nod to the XTR III, but the XTR III gains a ton of degradation, chromatic abberation etc. above 20x in fact I'd call them equal at 25x and that's at the PST II's max. I would not call that a good showing for the XTR III, considering how old the PST 2 is. The XTR Pro of course is a step up, but still falls off a lot after about 22x, but of course better than the PST 2, and the Steiner is a bit better yet, but even that at 25-30x is really washed out and the resolution drop is significant. Noticeably more than say my Razor gen 2's fall off from 20-25-27x, none of them are as good at max power as the middle of their range, but the Burris/Steiner's seem to fall off more than I'm used to. Also the clicks on the XTR III/Pro IMO are very weak, better on the Pro, but really mushy on the XTR III (partly because they use a very thick o-ring to seal the turret that creates a lot of resistance. I honestly would not give $1100 for an XTR III, it's maybe an $800 scope in 2025.
Street prices are not that far off really if you hunt around.....
Razor $1100
XTR 3 $1100
Steiner $1500
Mk4HD $1200
