Hi Guys, time for some japanese glass...
March-FX 5-40x56 FFP FML-1 IR
This scope was mounted on the TRG with Spuhr´s ISMS on both days. We were curious and excited to try it out. From the unboxing, it attracted attention, excitement and hesitation. Could this elegant, sleek looking scope really deliver what the specs say? We were eager to find out…
Turrets are low profile, but still visible. The knobs protrude, but just enough to get good grip. We all liked how it felt bare hands and with gloves. Clicks were just a bliss. Solid, distinct and a really nice sound to it. It felt like when you close a door on a first class mercedes. Like the knobs on a german bank vault…! Yeah I´m overdoing it, but they were the top clicks this weekend, no contest.
Some of the participants preferred a slightly higher turret, while others preferred the sleek profile the March gets with their low turrets. Overall we agreed on: solid, very well made and a very pleasant feeling when clicking. They are not locking turrets, but it felt unlikely that they would click by mistake, by any use or situation we could think of.
Now, that is a good thing, because we had to do a lot of clicking since the increments were
.05 mil. This turned out to be time-consuming and impractical on our shooting session. Shooters normally get the mil call from the spotter and will convert it to clicks on his scope, next shooter fires and get the call and so forth. The March shooter was either holding up the line or lost count.
However the March has a neat feature, a Zero stop so easy to use that all of us got it directly by looking at the turret. This made things easier, but a March shooter is still slower untrained than a US optics shooter untrained.
When you are looking at a scope with a magnification from 5-40 in FFP, one of the first things that come to mind is the reticle. Because there is no way it can be ideal for both x5 and x40… or can it?
The March 5-40x56 had the FML-1 reticle (see thumbnail) and it is a neat solution. We liked it from x5 all the way out to x40. For me personally it was a pleasant surprise to see it perform so well on the low side of the scale. Lowest sett it looks like a normal floating crosshair, and on the highest, the floating .05 diameter dot works very well for us.
The illumination comes in either high setting or low setting from the factory. This was the low setup. The pushbutton is located on the parallax adjustment, and has I think four settings and the off in a cycle. This is a sensible setup in our opinion, when you want to minimize and streamline the scope. The button is large enough to access with gloves. We saw no ”bleeding” of the reticle at the highest power. Like the Hensoldt it was a little to weak for daylight / high noon use in this configuration. The lowest setting appeared a touch too bright, not bad but could have been one step lower power. Another thought was to have just the dot illuminated with same brightness.
Optically… hmm, how to describe it… the March 5-40x56 is crystal clear and extremely sharp. In resolution there were none to beat it. Color, saturation were flawless also at the highest magnification (x40). It had little or no issues in backlight and, to our surprise, did very well in all kinds of angles we threw at it, altering power setting back and forth. We saw a slight tunneling at the lowest power set, but you had to look for it to see it.
The darkness had little effect on the March, it performed very well - surprisingly well if you think of the magnification range. We saw details in the moonlit wood line at 1000m with power set at x8, and could see the hunting tower but not with the details that the Hensoldts could, although closer than anticipated.
But, and there is a big but with this scope. You have to love adjusting parallax if you shoot with this scope. Everything described above concerning optic performance came with a lot of parallax adjustment. The depth of view is short, it actually reminds me more of photography were sharpness appear in one distinct point. The higher power you have, the trickier it got for us. We thought it was somewhat difficult during daytime, in darkness it was really hard.
Eyebox was ok at low power, but as you climbed the power ladder, the eye box shrunk down, and parallax adjustment became very sensitive. I observed the guys shooting the TRG mounted March. They were wiggling their heads, stretching necks and constantly adjusting the parallax. After some missed shots, they started to mumble things I could not hear.
The problem was down to three things: sensitive parallax combined with short depth of view; small eye box on higher power setting; borrowed rifles.
We all wanted to shoot well with this scope, we were intrigued with it and tried our best to shoot small groups on high power setting. It did not work as well as we wanted, so we decided to keep it on the TRG and try one more time sacrificing time on one of the Hensoldts.
Sunday morning I had made up my mind to give the scope some serious work and started with two spotters on my side with some nice glass. I adjusted the TRG as best I could and worked my way out on the steel targets. Very carefully adjusting the parallax as I went by 500m and I was still hitting… And then my spotters started to pick up vapor trails. After some shooting corrections I was also able to see vapor trail through the scope!
I tried a couple of shots on 950m and was on target for three shots in a row with the March 5-40x56 with standard 7.62x51 NATO ammo. This with a borrowed rifle and a new scope! OK enough bragging. My fellow shooter who struggled with same setup is a better shooter than I am. But the setup did not fit him on this day, and the March is unforgiving.
So, you have to treat it like a F1 car, fiddle a lot with parallax, adjust your rifle to exactly fit your face and then you have a scope that can deliver optical resolution, clarity and magnification like no other scope.
We predict that the learning curve for this march scope to work properly, is much longer than any other scope we looked at during this weekend.
And for tactical work at dawn or dusk with pressure… I don´t know, too sensitive and difficult to adjust under stress. You can see the benchrest heritage in the scope, and it is wonderful in many ways, but the price you pay is to give up a lot of practicality by tuning and adjusting.
