TheNatural21
CGN Regular
- Location
- Fort Nelson, BC
I've had a Falcon S8i for a couple years and I thought it was time for a bit of a review.
I purchased it new and it has been moved around to a few different guns. It was briefly on an M14-type, it was on an AR10-type for a little while, and it has now been on two different 22's. On the semi auto centerfires it held up to a few hundred rounds, and around 1000 on the 22's so far. Mostly just target use at the range, some grouse hunting on the 22's. Not very demanding use cases, although the M14's do have a reputation for eating optics.
Here are a couple photos of it mounted on my new TUF-22 taken earlier today
The good:
-Good glass for the price
-Turret tracking is repeatable, tactile, and audible
-Somehow it has over 90 MILS of vertical travel in the turrets.
-turrets match reticle (mil/mil)
-30mm tube
-It gives the general impression of quality beyond its price point
The bad:
-The eye box is very unforgiving at 8x
-SFP (I much prefer a FFP reticle)
-no zero stop (although I'm not aware of anything else in this price range that has one)
The reticle illuminates. I have that feature on a couple scopes but never use it so I'm not counting it as a plus, although it might be a plus for you. It would make a decent low light almost-red-dot on 1x with the reticle illuminated I guess; I just haven't shot it in conditions that required it.
You may have noticed that I said it has over 90 mils of travel. When I first unboxed it I thought it was broken or mislabeled. Surely the turret caps are continuing to spin after it's maxed out, or it's actually in MOA and not mils, right? Well, I tested it right away and it was definitely in mils. The turret travel worked reliably for the few mils I needed to go to 3-400 yards with a 308 and I was happy with that, never testing it further until today.
I wanted to get into some longer range 22 shooting that would actually use a lot more of that travel, so I thought i should test it out and see what's actually going on closer to the extremes. As it sits in the pictures above the turrets turn 60 mils up and 34 mils down, thanks to the 30moa rail and some shims in the Burris rings.
I set up some targets on the 25m line. The five targets were arranged vertically and I always aimed at the bottom one. I cranked the turrets up 11.5 mils each time to change my point of impact to the next target up. Unfortunately my target stand/board is only about 5ft high so I wasn't able to test it right to the extreme, but at that distance it was 46 mils from my zero to the top target. And it hit all of them, tracking properly. I shot 5 rounds in each target on the way up and another 5 on the way down. It returned to zero and except for a couple targets that had some slight horizontal shifts due to wind, the shots fired on the way down hit the same spots as the first groups on the way up. Confirmed 46 mils of usable vertical travel in this scope, and it keeps spinning for another 14 mils that I can't even test. Considering high end target optics typically have about 30 mils of total travel (up and down) I'm pretty blown away.
That 46 mils of confirmed travel is enough to get a standard velocity 22lr out to 600 yards. With the extra top end that I wasn't able to confirm, it would get a 22 to 700 yards. All with zero set a 25m. I have no idea how they do it, but I am pretty darn impressed. I'm also a little curious to see how long it holds up with me using the turrets a lot more on the 22. I don't plan on trying to shoot out to 700 yards, but 3-400m is certainly in it's future.
I purchased it new and it has been moved around to a few different guns. It was briefly on an M14-type, it was on an AR10-type for a little while, and it has now been on two different 22's. On the semi auto centerfires it held up to a few hundred rounds, and around 1000 on the 22's so far. Mostly just target use at the range, some grouse hunting on the 22's. Not very demanding use cases, although the M14's do have a reputation for eating optics.
Here are a couple photos of it mounted on my new TUF-22 taken earlier today
The good:
-Good glass for the price
-Turret tracking is repeatable, tactile, and audible
-Somehow it has over 90 MILS of vertical travel in the turrets.
-turrets match reticle (mil/mil)
-30mm tube
-It gives the general impression of quality beyond its price point
The bad:
-The eye box is very unforgiving at 8x
-SFP (I much prefer a FFP reticle)
-no zero stop (although I'm not aware of anything else in this price range that has one)
The reticle illuminates. I have that feature on a couple scopes but never use it so I'm not counting it as a plus, although it might be a plus for you. It would make a decent low light almost-red-dot on 1x with the reticle illuminated I guess; I just haven't shot it in conditions that required it.
You may have noticed that I said it has over 90 mils of travel. When I first unboxed it I thought it was broken or mislabeled. Surely the turret caps are continuing to spin after it's maxed out, or it's actually in MOA and not mils, right? Well, I tested it right away and it was definitely in mils. The turret travel worked reliably for the few mils I needed to go to 3-400 yards with a 308 and I was happy with that, never testing it further until today.
I wanted to get into some longer range 22 shooting that would actually use a lot more of that travel, so I thought i should test it out and see what's actually going on closer to the extremes. As it sits in the pictures above the turrets turn 60 mils up and 34 mils down, thanks to the 30moa rail and some shims in the Burris rings.
I set up some targets on the 25m line. The five targets were arranged vertically and I always aimed at the bottom one. I cranked the turrets up 11.5 mils each time to change my point of impact to the next target up. Unfortunately my target stand/board is only about 5ft high so I wasn't able to test it right to the extreme, but at that distance it was 46 mils from my zero to the top target. And it hit all of them, tracking properly. I shot 5 rounds in each target on the way up and another 5 on the way down. It returned to zero and except for a couple targets that had some slight horizontal shifts due to wind, the shots fired on the way down hit the same spots as the first groups on the way up. Confirmed 46 mils of usable vertical travel in this scope, and it keeps spinning for another 14 mils that I can't even test. Considering high end target optics typically have about 30 mils of total travel (up and down) I'm pretty blown away.
That 46 mils of confirmed travel is enough to get a standard velocity 22lr out to 600 yards. With the extra top end that I wasn't able to confirm, it would get a 22 to 700 yards. All with zero set a 25m. I have no idea how they do it, but I am pretty darn impressed. I'm also a little curious to see how long it holds up with me using the turrets a lot more on the 22. I don't plan on trying to shoot out to 700 yards, but 3-400m is certainly in it's future.
