Spotters: Under $900

Updated in January, 2023.

 

This is sort of an interesting category since $900 or so appears to be the level of financial discomfort that a lot of people are willing to tolerate.  While in the higher price ranges there are only a few Chinese made scopes that I have recommended, here just about everything is made in China, but to an increasing degree it is made well.  You’ll see a lot of Athlons here, since I really like what they offer or the money in this price range (it is interesting that with alpha stuff, it is hard to look past Swarovski, while in the mid-range, Athlon is doing good things).

Ultimately, I have seen very little, if anything, change in this price range in terms of being noteworthy, except now I have a lot more mileage with these.

For my personal use, I have pretty much settled on Athlon Ares UHD G2 with a 65mm objective and 22x reticle eyepiece.  It is reasonably compact, optically good, and gives me the same reticle as in the Athlon Cronus Tactical spotter that I also use.  The larger Ares spotter with a 28x reticle eyepiece is also available, but for my purposes, 22x is a better general purpose magnification.  I do have a nice 16-48x eyepiece for it, but I can’t think of the last time I used it.  Fixed power works fine for my purposes.

With small spotters, if you need something truly compact, there are two good options here:  Vortex Razor HD 11-33×50 and Athlon Cronus 12-36×50.  Both are surprisingly good optically given the small size.  I somewhat prefer the Razor due to the straight eyepiece.  Cronus is angled only.

With 80mm or greater objective, we have the larger of the two Vortex Viper HD spotters: 20-60×85.  It is a very respectable spotter, but the biggest reason it gets on my list is the available fixed power reticle eyepiece.  Unfortunately, the eyepiece is 33.5x which is a bit more than I typically like in an eyepiece of this type, but it seems to work quite well.

There are a few potentially interesting designs in this price range from Bushnell, Sightmark and some others, but I have been unsuccessful in getting these companies to reply to my e-mails, so it has not been easy to look at them.

Given my time limitations, I sorta end up going down a path of least resistance in mostly testing products that are comparatively easy for me to get my hands on and from companies that I have some confidence in terms of standing behind their product.