Well I took a chance and ordered one of the Burris Eliminator III laser ranging riflescopes to play with and see if it would suit for the Sniper Hide Cup shoot this May. When I got it in I was relatively impressed with the optics, build quality, and overall appearance. That being said I was not impressed with the retical knobs, but if the scope works as advertised they should only be rarely adjusted anyway. I've also become used to side mounted parallax adjustments, so it was a stretch to use the adjustment on the objective lens (no pun intended). I also would have preferred to have had the activation buttons closer to me. All that being said let me go on to how the scope functions.
I sighted it in at 100 yards without batteries, as they were not needed for this purpose. Sighting in was routine and in just a few rounds was able to get sub MOA bulls eye groupings. It was now time to tune the scope to my particular load, in my case the Hornady 140g A-Max in 6.5 Creedmoor. To do so you input your bullet's G1 Ballistic Coefficient and it's drop in inches at 750 yards (drop number). Although the scope comes with a pretty comprehensive table of loads I used my calculated drop from my Ballistics program and then confirmed it at 600 yards (which happened to be dead on).
At that point I would hold my cross hairs on my target, push the range button, and then read the range in yards and the wind offset in mils for a 10mph full value wind, and then hold at the indicated red dot on the vertical retical extension. I was limited to 600 yards max range but between 100 and 600 it was on good enough to routinely hit 6" steel gongs. I was very happy and impressed with one small exception:
The electronics are designed to keep your wind and elevation holds displayed for 90 seconds or until you range again. After 90 seconds they go off and you have to push the range button to reacquire. At least that was the way it was supposed to work. On this particular scope though, when I let the range display time out it would not reactivate until you actually removed and reinstalled the battery. In fact to verify my 600yd ballistic inputs I left the battery case off so that the recoil would jar the battery loose and I'd then reinstall to range another target. Thinking that I had a weak battery I purchased a brand new one but it had the same issue. Burris tech support told me to return the scope, which I have done; but with their published warranty turn-around times of 4-6 weeks I am concerned that I won't have it back in time to acclimate prior to the Cup match.
Hopefully this was just an outlier glitch, as the capabilities really impressed me in the short time that i had to play with it. It does irk me to have thrown away a number of VERY hard to find factory rounds when I just barely have enough for the match.
I sighted it in at 100 yards without batteries, as they were not needed for this purpose. Sighting in was routine and in just a few rounds was able to get sub MOA bulls eye groupings. It was now time to tune the scope to my particular load, in my case the Hornady 140g A-Max in 6.5 Creedmoor. To do so you input your bullet's G1 Ballistic Coefficient and it's drop in inches at 750 yards (drop number). Although the scope comes with a pretty comprehensive table of loads I used my calculated drop from my Ballistics program and then confirmed it at 600 yards (which happened to be dead on).
At that point I would hold my cross hairs on my target, push the range button, and then read the range in yards and the wind offset in mils for a 10mph full value wind, and then hold at the indicated red dot on the vertical retical extension. I was limited to 600 yards max range but between 100 and 600 it was on good enough to routinely hit 6" steel gongs. I was very happy and impressed with one small exception:
The electronics are designed to keep your wind and elevation holds displayed for 90 seconds or until you range again. After 90 seconds they go off and you have to push the range button to reacquire. At least that was the way it was supposed to work. On this particular scope though, when I let the range display time out it would not reactivate until you actually removed and reinstalled the battery. In fact to verify my 600yd ballistic inputs I left the battery case off so that the recoil would jar the battery loose and I'd then reinstall to range another target. Thinking that I had a weak battery I purchased a brand new one but it had the same issue. Burris tech support told me to return the scope, which I have done; but with their published warranty turn-around times of 4-6 weeks I am concerned that I won't have it back in time to acclimate prior to the Cup match.
Hopefully this was just an outlier glitch, as the capabilities really impressed me in the short time that i had to play with it. It does irk me to have thrown away a number of VERY hard to find factory rounds when I just barely have enough for the match.
