That's a tough decision. We'll leave the recommendations and testimonies to folks on here, but feel free to give us a call or shoot us a message if you have any specific questions.

This. *fist bumps Vortex across the internets*

My advice is, go with the reticle that suits you best. Both companies strive to do a good job of taking care of the customer and both of these optics have made a lot of shooters happy. Vortex is a competitor of course but we have absolute respect for them.

I'm not an optical engineer but I did have a long conversation with one about this very issue recently. I'll try to pass along a bit of what I remember and hopefully not get it wrong.

When you are looking at a 2 MOA microdot, you are looking at light from a tiny little LED that is reflecting off of a coating from an interior lens. The coating is fancy (that's a technical term!) in that light can pass through it from the front, but light that hits it from the rear gets reflected back. The LED light source is really close to the piece of glass with the coating because the microdot is so small, so it doesn't have to be really powerful. It can be relatively dim and still reflect nicely and give you a bright dot in that tiny little package. So, for example, our microdots are rated at 50,000 hours battery life.

Now, if you take essentially the same tech and scale it up even a little in size, things change pretty dramatically. In our 30mm full size red dot, now the light from the LED has to reach further and reflect off a larger piece of glass but still be a sharp and tight 2 MOA. This requires a more powerful LED emitter, with the result that the full size unit is only rated at 14,000 hours battery life. That's a giant drop from a small red dot to a larger red dot simply due to the scale. If you get even bigger and want to throw enough light to project a more complex reticle with hologram technology, it gets worse. EOtech EXPS-2 is rated at just 600 hours from a honking big CR123 battery.

Now, when we get to LVPO optics, everything changes again. Speaking just for PA and our current line of optics, we aren't projecting a dot to bounce off reflective glass. Instead we have to bounce a LOT of light off of laser etching which is normally viewed as black. Imagine taking a wall that's painted black and shining a red light on it so brightly that the black wall reflects the light and appears to be a red wall instead. How much light would it take to make the black wall look "daylight bright" for a shooter in the Arizona sun shooting at white steel torso targets? A BUNCH of light, and a bunch of battery draw. One of the biggest gripes about our LPVOs is that the illumination isn't bright enough in daylight, yet we only rate ours at 250 hours at a medium setting.

Other manufacturers have come up with setups that offer daylight bright illumination basically adapting the red dot technology to their LVPO units. The Razor 1-6x is a great example of this. Super bright center dot on that unit, it's great, but they aren't really illuminating the reticle, they are adding a red dot to your LPVO. It's wonderfully bright and a big part of why that scope is worth $1400. But even then, Vortex only rates it at 150-250 hours battery life. So even at a higher price point, this is just all that current technology can do.

Anyone who can come up with a solution to this issue, we would just love to hire you and pay you well to help us out with it.

Man, I can't even tell you how a dual focal actually looks inside if you took a sawzall and cut the thing in half.

Me trying to understand high end US Optics scopes: