Re: Leica CRF 1600 vs Bushnell Elite 1600
We found the Leica laid on top of the Bushnell was a good way to get it pretty steady since we didn’t have the adapter.
If anyone has any particular questions, but I’ll just put down what we did and what our impressions were.
We were testing between 1230 and 230 during bright sunshine and it was a bit cloudy as well for a while. We were ranging the same targets one after the other alternating between the Bushnell and the Leica. The Leica was laying on top of the Bushnell. The bushel was mounted to a tripod. To ‘confirm’ a distance we shot each target three times and then compared each units readings.
Glass - by far the Leica was better. This wasn’t a surprise, but for my friend who was out with me, he was quite surprised to see the difference between the two. The specific difference wasn’t in the sharpness, just the brightness. It seemed the Bushnell was just darker. Not hard to see things, just darker vs. the Leica.
Tripod - The Bushnell wins here due to the face that it has a built in stud vs. the adapter that is needed by Leica.
Speed of ranging - the Leica wins here slightly, about .25/.5 of a second. Nothing major, just slightly noticeable. It was faster when it would decide to range.
Ease of ranging - The Bushnell wins here. Whoever said that beyond 900+ the Bushnell would win was right. Out to 890-ish they both would pop a range back instantly. We were attempting to range a house at 1350 and out of 5 attempts the Bushnell ranged it 4 times. The Leica was much more finicky and would only read it back once. The same pattern occurred when we tried to range other long range objects such as trees, tree lines, barns, and combines. The Leica would pop the distance right up, if it thought you had done everything correctly.
Accuracy - I didn’t have a GPS with me to verify, but they both reported the same distance or were +/- 1yd of each other. I’d call that a draw
Repeatability of Ranging – Both of the units gave consistent readings as long as we were shooting the same area. I’d give it a draw in this category as well
Extra features – The Leica did have the nice features of some bullet drop compensation, as did the Bushnell. The problem is that you can’t calibrate it. It’s just a pick form exiting curves. While I’m sure it’s helpful to some, I think that we would probably all go with an application like shooter or the like.
The Leica did have the nice built in angle, temp, and pressure. I think that would be handy, but for a price difference of $400, I’d rather just get a kestrel 4500 and keep the extra $100.
Final thoughts on it. I think that I’m going to go with the Bushnell. The core ability to “be a rangefinder” was definitely just better with the Bushnell. The Leica’s strong points were the display and the glass, but it’s a rangefinder, not a scope. If it is difficult to use and hard to get a reading what’s the point?