I own neither right now. I’m still deciding on what I’m buying. The following is an anecdote, from a short afternoon at Mile High.
Let me follow that preface with a caveat: I have exceptional eyesight. Everything else I’ve got is fucked up and working like a Fiero on its 9th owner, but my eyes are still 20/10.
With the 7-35 ATACR in Mil-C, I could clearly resolve the individual bulbs in a traffic light’s tree at 800 yards. Not the green, yellow, and red lenses. I’m referring to the bulbs inside the lenses. This was at 35x, between 35-55°F (what am I a weather gauge). Some mirage, but not enough to make it annoying.
I did not look through anything else next to it, didn’t have time.
Optics are a funny thing. You should decide whether you’re after pure resolving power, or image fidelity, which is how I refer to the scopes ability to transmit what your eye would see through the lenses and give you a nice, warm image with colors and depth of field, a nice image to look at that is true to life. Or, a nice even mix like the photography world calls image quality. Not really apples to apples, and I’m sure someone will correct some of my terminology as out of date, but the concepts are the same.
Nightforce, even the 7-35, still looks like I’m looking through a Nightforce. I consider that a good thing. The NXS was a shit hot scope when it was one of a small handful of quality options. It’s still a quality option, the glass just isn’t quite as nice to look through. The ATACR resolves insanely well, but it does NOT have the warm, friendly image of a legacy S&B PMII. It is like taking the same image, and editing one to favor color saturation and contrast, then editing the other to maximize every single fucking bit of detail, every pixel as good as it can be. If you’re a “pixel peeper”, the 7-35 will blow your skirt up.
More perspective:
In 2007, an S&B was as good as you were going to get. USO was at the top of their game (in my opinion), had excellent CS and ridiculously good optics in a stupidly tough scope. NF basically just had the NXS, a hell for stout scope that lacked on the glass end enough to irritate. Leupold’s flagship was still the MK4, which was and still is a very good scope, with horribly mushy turrets.
Shooters today are inundated with a massive amount of optics that meet or exceed those baselines, and it becomes important to self assess. Do you have medical issues that cause issues? I do, I’ve had something like 4 TBI’s and optics really fuck with my eyes and brain if they’re not really good. CA is intolerable to me. Coatings that boost saturation and contrast in the rendered images can also get to me, if it’s too much.
How good are your eyes? Take ego out of the equation entirely, go to the eye doctor and tell them you’re thinking about getting a pilots license, and you need to know exactly how good your eyes are. If you’re sitting with vision corrected to 20/20 or have ocular occlusions or whatever they’re calling them, etc, you likely won’t be able to tell a difference. If you’re uncorrected sitting at 20/20, you may see some. Not everyone’s eyes render color the same in each eye, let alone from person to person. Get an honest appraisal of your eyesight and not what your ego says it is. If you truly do have exceptional eyesight, you should probably already know that, and you’ll be able to see a difference in a lot of things.
There’s also visual acuity to think about. Most places can’t even test lower than 20/15, the VA here can’t rest lower than a cursory 20/10. Two people with statistically identical eyesight numbers will not see things the same way. Our eyes are weird like that. Some see things instantly, others have to look. Example being the desert sheep or mule deer/coues deer hunter, some can spot an ear through the spotter at 3 miles because it flicked a fly off. Others can be looking right at an entire unobstructed 36 point mega buck at 500 and never see it.
Some people can see 22 caliber bullet holes on white paper at 100 yards. With the right light, I can still see them, but not like I could when I was young. Some people have a very hard time seeing those same holes through binoculars, even with similar eyesight. The importance of self assessment is that you determine what YOUR needs are. If your eyes are garbage, you probably need every advantage you can get to make up for it. If your eyes are stellar and you have no neurological issues to worry about, then you can likely take your pick based on feature set and ergonomics alone, even shitty glass to get good prices and mechanically excellent scopes on more rifles.
I personally have the problem of good eyes, and bad brain. It makes the optical part of the equation the most important for me, and that is down to how your eyes and brain see and render an image through the optical system, in this case the scope. If your eyes get tired or your head starts to ache looking through a scope, make a note of it and come back to it in a half hour or after your eyes have relaxed. It may be that the diopter and parallax are all fucky and you’re just having a hard time with that, and a quick adjustment fixes it. Maybe it doesn’t, and that’s okay. Ocular fatigue can cause all kinds of fun problems. Scopes are tools, you wouldn’t get emotionally invested in a MIG welder or a belt grinder, you’d just want the best option you can afford that’s going to do what you need it to do. Treat a scope, rifle, all of this shit like the tools they are, and things get more simple.
That’s a TL;DR way of saying that optical image preferences are so personal, and there are so many options, it is worth driving somewhere wity every scope that tightens your trousers on the shelf, go outside with all of them, and look through them. Whichever one makes you go, “fuck, that’s nice”, is probably the one for you, or at least worth making a note of. Look at them all. Optics in general should not create eye fatigue or give you migraines (allegedly, in a perfect world). In my experience, everything not alpha grade Swarovski, or Zeiss, gives me problems. It makes it real fun shooting through a Vortex.
I’m gonna rustle some jimmies right now, so if you’re easily triggered, just hit that ignore button or scroll right on by.
Every Kahles scope I’ve looked through had CA. I don’t care if you can see it or not, I can. Vortex, even the Gen 2 Razor and AMG, I can see optical imperfections and CA, it’s not the quality people make it out to be. I don’t care who agrees or disagrees. It’s a good scope, I wanted to like it and don’t even care about the weight, but it’s not in the same league as the ATACR, or even the Kahles. I really, really wanted to get a Kahles, the feature set, reticles, and build quality are impressive to me in every way, but 10 minutes behind one and I feel like I have an ice pick in my brain.
All that to say, I have time behind a BEAST, ATACR, NXS, S&B PMII (3-12, 4-16, 5-25), USO legacy models, Vortex, Leupold MK4’s, Kahles, and the 7-35 ATACR resolves so well that I couldn’t find a *reasonable* complaint. I could still see a bit of image degradation, but I have seen that in every scope I’ve ever looked through, every piece of camera gear to include Hasselblad medium format cameras and pro body Nikon DSLR’s, Swarovski EL’s, etc. It’s just not possible to duplicate what the human eye can see. I dare anybody to be stupid enough to argue that there’s a scope that can translate any image with absolute true to life image fidelity.
If anyone makes a scope that will outperform a 7-35 inside its price bracket, I’d like to see it. Pepsi challenge, I’ll provide the whiskey and the venue.
That said, I’m probably sticking a 4-16x42 in Mil-C on my 308, and a TT525P on my 338NM. Still need to look through a TT to determine whether that’s where my money is going, if it doesn’t blow the 7-35 out of the water, and I mean “I’m calling the cops, this has to be illegal” kinda good, I’m sticking the 7-35 on the 338.
