What is the Best Scope for Hunting? (And Why Almost Everyone Chooses Wrong)

The Internet Is Getting It Wrong

Ask the internet what the best hunting scope is and you’ll get a confident answer from a thousand people who have never thought about the question properly. The top-upvoted recommendation on Reddit for a hunting optic is a Leupold VX-3 3.5-10×40. The Leupold VX-3 is a well-made scope, but its magnification range is wrong for hunting. Below, we show why, using arithmetic, the doctrine of military snipers, and the steps of a hunt.

Most of you will disagree with the first paragraph of the next section. Read to the end anyway.

1. Buying for a Distance You Will Never Shoot

Choose a magnification range by starting with one question: at what distance will I actually be shooting? Not the distance you imagine, but the distance the statistics show.

The Average Big Game Shot Is Around 130 to 145 Yards

All three sources fall between roughly 130 and 145 yards. Call it 140 yards as a working figure for big game.

The South Carolina study has one more detail. Shots that resulted in a dead deer averaged 127 yards. Shots that missed averaged 150 yards. The further out hunters reached, the more often they came home with nothing.

The distribution matters as much as the average. Hunters take roughly 45% of big game inside 100 yards, and in wooded and eastern-state country, the typical shot is closer to 50 to 75 yards, about the distance across a large room. The vast majority of successful hunts happen well inside 300 yards. Past 300 yards, you’re far more likely to miss, take an unethical shot, or fail to recover the animal. In Field & Stream’s own testing, even the best hunters with the best equipment had more misses than hits at 400 yards.

Your Cartridge Has a Ceiling Too

Most hunters never calculate a second limit. Your maximum ethical hunting distance is roughly the point where your bullet slows to 1,900 feet per second. Below that speed, the bullet can fail to expand, and a bullet that doesn’t expand wounds rather than kills. The exact speed varies by caliber and bullet design, but 1,900 feet per second is a good general rule.

A .308 Winchester bullet drops below 1,900 FPS at about 400 yards, so terminal ballistics set a hard ceiling of 400 yards for a .308 hunter.

It makes no sense to put a scope good for 800 yards on a rifle with an ethical ceiling of 400 yards.

What the Military Chooses, and What It Means for You

If you won’t take our word for the magnification range, take the word of the experts in the US military, who know a heck of a lot more about this topic than practically anyone else.

Military snipers in combat typically engage between 300 and 1,300 yards, with most engagements between 550 and 900 yards, for an average engagement distance of about 725 yards. The U.S. Army’s standard sniper optic for that work is the Mark 5HD 5-25×56.

Hunters take big game at an average of roughly 140 yards:

140 ÷ 725 = 19%

A hunter shoots at less than a fifth of a military sniper’s distance, so scale the optic to match:

By that math, a hunter’s scope should bottom out at 1X and top out at about 5X. A 1-6X LPVO covers that range with room to spare. The distance data gives the same answer.

Richard Mann also recorded the magnification hunters used at the moment they shot each of those 64 animals. The average was 6X, and that includes hunters carrying scopes that went to 16X and beyond. In the field, hunters dial down to roughly 6X anyway.

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2. Believing Extra Magnification Is Free

Here is the belief at the center of this whole problem: having extra magnification never hurt anyone.

That belief is false. We’d guess that every day in North America, hunters go home empty-handed because the magnification range on their scope is too high, and they have no idea their scope cost them the animal. They’ll blame the wind, the animal, or their luck.

Six Ways Excessive Magnification Works Against You

Every one of those six losses shows up in the field.

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3. Giving Up 1X at the Bottom of the Range

The bottom number on your scope matters more than the top one, because of the order of steps in a hunt:

The Five Steps of a Successful Hunt

Hunts most often fail at step 4, and nobody picks a scope for step 4.

Your Eyes Are 1X

You don’t walk the woods with a scope pressed to your face looking for deer. You spot your deer with your bare eyes, and your bare eyes are 1X. If 3X were better for spotting your prey, God would have given you 3X eyesight.

Now the clock starts. You have to get from “I can see it” to “I can see it through the scope” before your dinner walks off. You get there fastest when the view through the scope matches the view you already have.

At 1X, the view through the scope matches your natural vision, so you find the animal in the scope almost instantly. Once the animal is in the scope, you dial up to 4X, 6X or whatever you need, and shoot.

What Happens When Your Scope Starts at 2X

At 2X, your field-of-view through the scope is half what it is at 1X, and you hunt for the animal by waving the rifle around. At 4X, you’re down to a quarter of the field-of-view, and finding the animal is four times harder.

You can spend an absurd amount of time swinging a rifle around, trying to find an animal in your scope that you can plainly see with your naked eye. That delay comes at the worst possible moment, because fast target acquisition separates a full freezer from an empty one.

“But 1X Isn’t Enough Magnification to Shoot Accurately”

Hunters raise this objection more than any other, and it rests on a misunderstanding. Nobody is telling you to take the shot at 1X. You find the animal fastest with the scope dialed to 1X. Once you have the animal in the scope, dial up to whatever magnification you need for the shot. You lose nothing.

Both Eyes Open

You can only shoot with both eyes open at 1X. One eye looks through the scope, and the other takes in the scene directly, so you see far more of what’s happening around the animal. You give that up the moment your scope’s lowest magnification is 2X or higher.

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4. Buying Glass Quality Before Getting Magnification Right

Plenty of people will tell you to buy the best glass you can afford, such as Tangent Theta or Schmidt & Bender. That advice is fine, but it comes second, after you choose the magnification range.

The 3-Gun Test

In 3-Gun matches, competitors move between positions and engage targets at short to medium range. Every competitor agrees on one point: you run iron sights or a 1X optic. Nobody argues a 2-6X would be better. Competitors would laugh at the suggestion, because with a magnified optic you’d stumble around waving your rifle, trying to find targets.

In a 3-Gun match, would you rather have:

Everyone picks the Tasco. It’s not close. With five thousand dollars of optically perfect German glass, you’d still be flailing, unable to find your targets.

Choosing the correct magnification matters more than having the world’s best glass. Glass quality is worth paying for after you’ve chosen the right magnification range.

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5. Not Considering a “Smart” Rangefinder and Scope Combo

With the right magnification range, you’ve solved step 4. Steps 2 and 3, ranging the animal and dialing your dope, still cost you time.

The traditional process is: range the animal, check your dope card, then dial your elevation turret or work out the right holdover on the reticle. Those steps take time while something with legs decides whether to stay put.

Most buying advice hasn’t caught up with Sig Sauer’s BDX system. In the BDX system, the ballistic solver sits in the rangefinder, not the scope. The rangefinder measures the distance, reads its onboard environmental sensors (on the KILO3K and up), solves the firing solution, and sends it to the scope over Bluetooth. The scope shows the solution as an illuminated holdover dot at the correct elevation. You don’t need a dope card, a turret or arithmetic.

The scope displays the solution, and the rangefinder calculates it, so the rangefinder you pair with the scope matters as much as the scope itself.

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Our Pick: The Sig Sauer EASY6-BDX 1-6X

At about $1,000, the Sig Sauer EASY6-BDX 1-6X meets every requirement in this article:

If you want a little more magnification at the top, a 1-8X follows the same logic. Don’t buy a scope that starts at 2X, 3X or 4X.

Completing the System

The Sig Sauer EASY6-BDX gets its holdover dot from the BDX rangefinder. So where is the rangefinder while you’re behind the rifle?

If your rangefinder is in your pack or your pocket, you’ve brought back the delay you just spent a thousand dollars removing. With the Sightlok RF-1, you mount your Sig BDX rangefinder on the rifle and co-witness it with the scope, so you range exactly where you’re aiming. You can quickly detach the RF-1 from the rail when you want to range a target you don’t want to point your muzzle at, and reattach when you’re done, while maintaining an accurate co-witness between your rangefinder and scope.

Okay, What Are the Downsides of Choosing the Sig?

We’ve made our case for the Sig BDX route, so here is the other side. Two strong arguments count against it, and if either one matters enough to you, buy something else.

1. You Depend on Electronics That Can Fail

Every part of a BDX setup can quit on you. The scope needs battery power to light the holdover dot. The rangefinder needs battery power to range and to solve. The Bluetooth link between them has to connect and stay connected. All of it has to work in cold, wet, dusty conditions, often after a week of getting knocked around in a truck and a pack.

Electronics fail more often than a traditional scope does. A fixed reticle in a mechanical scope has no battery, no firmware, no pairing step and nothing to fall out of sync. A mechanical scope works the ten thousandth time exactly as it worked the first.

The BDX system fails in different ways from a mechanical scope. A dead battery or a dropped connection at the wrong moment leaves you holding a scope with no dot in it, and if you’ve never practiced dialing dope the traditional way, you’re in trouble. Carry spare batteries, check the pairing before you hunt, and know your come-ups well enough to shoot without the electronics.

2. The Glass Isn’t Schmidt & Bender Glass

Earlier we argued that magnification range matters more than glass quality, and we stand by that argument. But glass quality still matters.

The optical quality in Sig BDX scopes is not at the level of a Schmidt & Bender, a Tangent Theta, or other top-tier European glass. You see the difference in edge-to-edge sharpness, in contrast, and in image quality in the last few minutes of legal light. A lot of game moves in low light, so the difference is not trivial.

You trade some optical quality for a ranging and ballistic system that removes two steps from the shot process. For most hunters, at the distances they shoot, the trade is worth making. For some, it won’t be.

Why You Might Still Want a Traditional Scope and Manual Dope

We take one case seriously. Suppose you worry about your gear failing in a SHTF scenario. You might run a Sig as your primary setup and still want a fallback optic with no batteries and no pairing, one you’ve practiced dialing on and can shoot accurately under pressure.

Keeping a fallback optic is a sound approach. Technology that gives you greater speed is great, but in an emergency, reliability matters more than speed. If reliability means more to you than shooting accurately and quickly, then by all means, buy a Schmidt & Bender or a similar LPVO and master it.

Apply the same magnification logic to a traditional scope. A traditional scope with the wrong magnification range is still the wrong scope. Choose the magnification first and the electronics second.

Who is Sightlok?

Sightlok publishes factual, unbiased reports and reviews on electro-optics gear, especially weapon-mounted laser rangefinders (WMLRF). We are the world’s leading independent expert on WMLRF options. We also design and build the Sightlok RF-1. We help you find gear that fits your needs and avoid gear that doesn’t.

Where does this information come from?

We base these reports on our own field experience with the products, on conversations with our customers, and on posts from respected members of forums like Snipershide, Rokslide and LongRangeHunting.

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