Took me a while to find a good comparison, so I thought I'd post this here for everyone's benefit. Really in-depth article on the subject and it helped me decide between the two. Also some info in there about laser sights for anyone who's interested in those. Hope it can be of use to others as well!

Electronic Sights; A look at why they exist, how they work, and how you use them.


Please post if you have personal experience with either type, or with both.

I can't help but be immediately skeptical of an article that's entitled "Electronic Sights" and has a picture of a Trijicon Reflex in the header...  

~Augee

The writer makes it clear in the first paragraph that he's using "electronic sights" as a generalization. Personally I don't know of a term that includes all three types of sight that he's comparing either.

I have a pretty bad astigmatism...in general, I've not found an electronic "dot scope" that I see as a round dot... the holographic sights, even the less expensive Bushnell models are better, but still some distorton... my Trijicon reflex gives me a good clean dot... my magnified Trijicons... excellent precise triangle and chevron...

"CQB Sights," Unmagnified Sights," "Parallax Limited Sights," hell, even "Reflex Sights."  

First impressions and all - if I wrote an article that was entitled "Big Cats of the World" and showed a picture of a lion, a tiger, and a bear, would you bother reading in to the first paragraph where I explain, "okay, so technically, a bear isn't a big cat..." and that I'm really just writing about large predatory mammals?  

~Augee

Really?  

The writer also discusses magnified sights, which would rule out the first two terms. And since reflex sights are one of the types being compared, it wouldn't make much sense to categorize them all that way. I suppose "Parallax Free" could work though. But being a noob like myself, I would have read that title, given it the Spock eyebrow, and looked elsewhere. I agree it's not technically accurate, but it works.

Yes, "really."

If an author/editor cannot understand the difference between "electronic" and "not electronic," what reason has he/she given me to care at all about what they have to say in the article?  

We're not talking about a topic you can really quibble with here - a sight either uses an electrical current to function or it does not.  "Reflex" is at least something that you can debate - what does constitute a "reflex" sight, and who says?  Is an OEG a reflex sight?  Who determined what a "reflex sight" is or isn't?  The author?  Why should I trust him to classify anything when he fails at the classification of "electronic" and "not electronic?"  

Yeah, roger - so he puts a disclaimer in his first paragraph.  They also let slip that there is an extremely wide range of sights that do use electricity to function that are not going to be talked about.  

You and I, and most other "wired" people, that is, those with access to the internet and mass communications are inundated by volumes upon volumes of text.  "Don't judge a book by its cover" sounds like a great statement of principle, and perhaps it worked at a time before Gutenberg when books were hand copied by monks, and maybe Friar so-and-so wasn't a very good artist after spending months copying a single book - but you, I, and everyone else on the internet is now forced to decide what to read and what not to read based on the way it's presented to us.  

If AR15.com was called "PuppiesandPonies.com," would you have found it?  Would you have decided - "you know what - I'm looking for information about AR15-pattern rifles, and that's what I want to read about - let's try puppiesandponies.com?"

If your "headline" displays clear falsities and inaccuracy, I will likely dismiss it and move on to the next article that interests me, one where the author seems to have at least a basic grasp of elementary concepts like "uses electricity" and "does not use electricity."

Without the photo - or with just photos of an Aimpoint and EOTech - I would probably feel differently.  I could read in to the first paragraph and say "ah, I get what he wants to talk about."  But displaying a prominent contradiction, with no indication that it's intended to be in some way humorous or ironic tells me either a) the author/editor doesn't know the difference, or b) the author/editor can't be bothered to ensure consistency and accuracy in their presentation making the entire text suspect.

Who's to say that if something so elementary is displayed so wrongly that anyone bothered to research the article?  It could all be made up for all we know, and no one went back to QC it for accuracy.  What reason have the author/editor given me to trust that the conclusions drawn in the article are correct?  This is how people get duped by politicians and the news media - they believe everything they read or hear, without ever looking back at the source of the information and determining whether that source is worth listening to or not.    

The internet has liberalized publication, anyone can get what they have to say "out there" and there's a lot of shit to wade through.  Being articulate and communicating effectively is becoming more, not less important in the era of mass, liberalized media.

You know what's more important than what kind of sight you have on your rifle?  Being articulate enough to explain to the cops, to a judge, or to a board of inquiry why it is you shot someone, and if you're not articulate enough to do it yourself, you'll goddamn good and well hire someone who is, i.e. an attorney, to do it for you.  The author/editor relationship works the same way.  You have something worth saying?  Either say it clearly, or find someone who can massage your gobbledy-gook into something that is.  

Anyways, there's my soapbox.  Didn't mean to de-rail the thread.  Enjoy.

~Augee

Augee, I understand and completely agree with your soapbox rant.

I must be a dumb fuck then, because I found the article quite interesting and it explained a few things I was unclear about. However, being said dumb fuck, I cannot verify the accuracy of anything I did not know before reading it, because I did not know what I did not know.



However, I can now apply said new knowledge to other articles and descriptions for verification.



Overall, I found the article helpful.



IMHO YMMV


 

Hahaha pwned! I was gonna try to come up with what would most likely have been a long-winded and drawn out way to say what you just said, but that pretty much sums it up. The only way to verify information one finds on the internet, using only the internet as a resource, is to find more information on the internet. The title of the article worked well enough to catch my eye, and it turned out to have exactly the information I was looking for. I followed it up by searching for other articles that verified the information to my satisfaction.

Has anyone tried the SRS (Sealed Reflex Sight)  ?  I saw one at a shop and I never knew they had a solar/battery until a customer service person told me that.  The dot was far clearer than most of the red dots i've used but this company has a Trijicon promo that temps me Trijicon SRS  

Anyone use the new SRS sight?

I've been wondering the same thing. They'd have to be the holy grail of optics though to justify that price tag for me.