I met a bird watcher that let me test his Swarovski ATX 95 scope on the clubs shooting range after a competition, and compared it to a Vortex Razor 85.
Results
Swarovski ATX is slightly sharper, has less(none that i could see) chromatic aberation, and a bit better contrast. The biggest improvement i could tell was that the eye box was a lot bigger, it was easier on the eyes to look through it(possibly due to the Swarovski having a bigger front lens, and not beeing set to maximum magnification). As for finding holes in paper at 300m, it is still a challange and depends on the target paper color, background and lighting.
Price
The Razor is about 1800$ and the Swarovski about 4300$ Image quality clearly improves with price, but it follows the law of diminishing returns. Small increments in price around 500-1000$ improves the image quality much more.
The test was done afocally, both images were a bit sharper IRL. 10 images were taken on each scope, and the sharpest chosen for the test. Both scopes were set to 60x magnification
Results
Swarovski ATX is slightly sharper, has less(none that i could see) chromatic aberation, and a bit better contrast. The biggest improvement i could tell was that the eye box was a lot bigger, it was easier on the eyes to look through it(possibly due to the Swarovski having a bigger front lens, and not beeing set to maximum magnification). As for finding holes in paper at 300m, it is still a challange and depends on the target paper color, background and lighting.
Price
The Razor is about 1800$ and the Swarovski about 4300$ Image quality clearly improves with price, but it follows the law of diminishing returns. Small increments in price around 500-1000$ improves the image quality much more.
The test was done afocally, both images were a bit sharper IRL. 10 images were taken on each scope, and the sharpest chosen for the test. Both scopes were set to 60x magnification
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