01-09-2022, 08:55 PM
Welcome to the forum! I too am "advanced" into the 70's, and my scope journey might be of interest to you. I started out with some more or less "economical" value-style scopes, I'd call them mid-range, nikon's and vortex, nothing beyond about $250 retail. But as my eyes aged they became harder and harder to use, so I've migrated to I guess the next tier, more like 400-800 scopes, street-price. And pretty much Vortex b/c I have less and less time to evaluate and migrate, I want to shoot as much as possible without continually swapping gear. Bottom line, I've pretty much settled on nothing below about the Vortex PST line. Now to some that maybe lower cost or etc, but in general put as much into the scope as you can afford. There are better scopes out there than PST's, but they are pretty good and range well out to 1000 yds. Euro-optics has sales on them from time to time.
Magnification: I have a different rule than most who speak on this: get what your eyes need, what someone else's eyes need will be different than yours. For me, 15-16X is what I like to have. For 100 yds I don't need that much but I'm in situations where you need to know how many spikes a deer's antlers have on each side, so I want to be able to count them and that means you need to see them. So I can zoom in to 15 or 16X and tell. To get to 1000 I personally like to have 18x or a bit more.
Hope that gives you some ideas to think about.
I don't use 1 in ch tubes much any more. It's more weight but like I said, clear is better than light-wt.
Magnification: I have a different rule than most who speak on this: get what your eyes need, what someone else's eyes need will be different than yours. For me, 15-16X is what I like to have. For 100 yds I don't need that much but I'm in situations where you need to know how many spikes a deer's antlers have on each side, so I want to be able to count them and that means you need to see them. So I can zoom in to 15 or 16X and tell. To get to 1000 I personally like to have 18x or a bit more.
Hope that gives you some ideas to think about.
I don't use 1 in ch tubes much any more. It's more weight but like I said, clear is better than light-wt.