46 AIRGUN WORLD http://www.airgunshooting.co.uk
I
’ve tried a few optical (day) scopes and
currently own four. All include parallax
adjustment and graduated reticles, and most
have large objective lenses for optimum dawn
and dusk light gathering; but there are big
differences. I love the reticle and super-wide
field of view (FOV) of the MTC Viper-X Connect
3-12 x 32, plus its illuminated reticle (IR). Just
the small centre cross illuminates, and it’s the
sharpest I’ve seen, but I’ll soon be selling this
as the short eye relief just doesn’t suit my eyes
- or big nose, for whatever reason.
FFP = BALANCING ACT
I’d heard of First Focal Plane (FFP) scopes and
was intrigued by them. The fundamental
difference is that the reticle scale stays the
same relative to any particular target, as you
zoom in and out, so knowing how much I love
the excellent MTC AMD2 reticle, I had a look at
the MTC Cobra F1 when in Livelines Guns &
Tackle, near Edinburgh, earlier this year.
The reticle looked awesome at low and
Russ Douglas examines the intriguing Discovery HD34 3-18 X 50 scope
PLANE-SPEAK
RUSS DOUGLAS
medium mag’, exactly what I was hoping for,
but I was put off when I found that on full
mag’, whilst scanning distant objects, the
reticle bars were a bit chunky and obscured
too many details for my liking. I went awaythinking that FFP was not for me.
Fast-forward to February, and I popped into
Blackpool to visit BAR, on my way south to the
British Shooting Show. They’d had a delivery
from Discovery Optics, so I got to check out
their FFP offering. By contrast, this FFP
reticle’s stadia were still fine at full mag’, so my
interest was piqued once more.CHOICES
Second focal Plane (SFP) reticles look the
same scale whether at high or low
magnification, i.e. the target size changes
relative to their size. You can also only aim
using pre-set mil-dots at a particular
magnification. The potential drawback of FFP
is that each brand has to choose its reticle’s
optimum magnification, so one FFP scope
might have a reticle that looks perfect at
low-to-medium mag’, but the concession is
appearing relatively chunky at high mag’, whilst
another might appear perfect mid-range, so
not to appear too chunky at high mag’ or too18x mag still sharp.What you get
in the box.