How much to spend on a scope

There’s nothing like looking at a website full of scopes and seeing dollar amounts ranging from $75 all the way to $3000 and not being able to discern much of a difference just by looking at the picture. As we stated earlier, most scopes look like black tubes, and it’s hard to tell solely from a visual standpoint what makes one scope more expensive than the other.

Cheap or Expensive glass…? That is the question!

The easiest way we’ve found to think of scope budgeting is to compare it to the cost of the rifle itself. Your average hunting or tactical rifle made by a reputable manufacturer like Remington, Winchester, Savage, Ruger, and any number of others usually runs somewhere in the $500-600 range, without a scope of course. Budget brands like Howa can be had for a little less than that – $450-550 usually. These are chambered in the most popular calibers for hunting and tactical shooting such as .308 and .30-06, and are for the most part your garden variety rifle. So how much should a scope cost for one of these?

Realistically, it should cost as much as the rifle itself, about $500. There is a good reason for that! Take a standard Remington 700 type bolt action rifle. Out of the box, the rifle is capable of sub MOA accuracy, meaning that at 100 yards, the rifle is capable of shooting groups that are less than an inch around – fairly accurate for a stock rifle.

Now you as the shooter want to be able to take advantage of that accuracy rather than leaving it on the table. You want a scope that won’t break the bank, but will have clear enough glass and precise enough adjustments to be able to shoot sub MOA, so realistically you’ll have to spend between $350-500 to get that sort of scope.

Okay, so let’s say you take that same Remington and put a custom chassis on it, a light trigger, a bottom metal detachable magazine kit and some other accessories. The rifle is now sitting at about $1500, and is capable of shooting .5 MOA with all these modifications. Again, your scope needs to jump an order of magnitude in cost, because a rifle that accurate requires a scope accurate enough to run with it. You’ll want to reach further out, and you might notice that your $500 scope you had before runs out of steamat 800 yards. You want more magnification, you want a larger objective, and you want better glass, which you get in the $1500 range.

You’re finally good enough at long range shooting that .308 has lost its luster, and you decide to purchase a custom built .338 Lapua Magnum rifle on an Accuracy International stock, fully kitted out. When the dust settles, you spent $4500 on the gun, and every time you pull the trigger, you spend $4 per round. Your intended range is 1500 yards and beyond, which your rifle is more than capable of achieving. At this point, you really need a scope that will be able to hang on with your rifle at such a long range. Keep one thing in mind – all scopes are great at short range – it’s the long ranges that separate the men from the boys! When you rock a rifle that can reach out to 2000 yards and beyond, you need a scope that can do the same, and you’ll spend at least $3500-$5500 to get it, plain and simple. The scope complements the weapons system, and you need to have the same capabilities in your scope as you do in your rifle – perhaps more, if you think about it.

Problems with cheap scopes:

You’ve heard us mention “cheap scopes” relatively frequently. So what exactly makes a cheap scope? Are all budget priced scopes cheap? Not necessarily. All of the major scope manufacturers have budget priced scopes that are well built, but they are simply less capable than their higher priced models is all. To use a vehicular analogy, suppose that you have a Toyota Camry and your neighbor has a Mercedes S550. Both cars fit four people in relative comfort. Both cars are more or less the same size. Why then does one car cost $100,000 more than the other? Simple – fit and finish, capability, and exclusivity. The Mercedes is a finely finished automobile par excellence, but that does not mean that the Camry is a piece of junk – not even close. They are both well built, but one is simply more capable and more refined than the other. Budget priced scopes are the Toyota Camry’s of the shooting world.

So what are cheap scopes? Simple – scopes in which corners are cut during production to give you what amounts to an inferior product at a bargain basement price. Cheap scopes will often have the following characteristics:

Poor quality glass: You’ll never see this in the store just by putting the scope up to your eye – not unless you can take the scope outside and look at something 300+ yards away. Poor glass is hard to describe but easy to spot. Put the scope on maximum magnification, and have a gander. If you find that you cannot get a clear image no matter what you position the magnification at, almost as if the image is chronically out of focus at the higher end of the spectrum – you have cheap glass. The glass is the most expensive part of making a scope, so if your scope cost $100, and that $100 is divided amongst things like glass, aluminum, labor, packaging, shipping, marketing, and overhead expenses, imagine how little was spent on the glass!

Mushy turrets and adjustments: High quality scopes have crisp turrets with no over travel or mushiness. Cheap scopes have inconsistent spaces between clicks, where one click will feel longer or shorter than the next, or be really soft. A good scope has strong, loud, positive clicks, a cheap one has soft, muted, and flatulent sounding clicks. How do you ever expect to get any precision out of something that’s mushy?