Range Report: New Optics

Another day at the range, this time with a new toy:

That’s a Sightmark 5x slide-to-side magnifier to go with my Sightmark holographic sight.

A magnifier, like any scope, has a quality called “eye relief”.  Position your eye too far away from the lense, and the result looks like this:

Get too close, and you see this:

Positioned correctly, you see this:

That’s the front sight post partially obscuring the view.  One of the disadvantages of this arrangement.

The second disadvantage is, this isn’t actually what I see when I look through the magnifier.  When I actually put my eye to it instead of the camera, the red holograph in the center is distorted.  I don’t mean the fairly mild lens flare seen here.  I mean the dot looks like somebody smeared it upward with his thumb.

The third disadvantage is that my shooting was actually worse than when I shot without it.

Crap!  Out of 30 shots fired, five to each target, I can’t even swear I hit the board more than 10 times at 100m, let alone put my shots on the target at which I was actually shooting! 

I need to bring this back in to 50m and see what happens.

American Eagle XM855F 62Gr FMJ-BT Ball:

Please ignore the .45ACP you’ll see scattered around the targets

Black Hills 55Gr FMJ “Remanufactured Seconds”:

Don’t pay attention to the XM856 in the upper left corner.  I did fire that ammo at this target, but it didn’t hit it, nor did it hit anywhere else on the board.  So I tried again with the Black Hills.

Black Hills 60Gr. Soft Point:

Again, pay no attention to the “Fiocchi” in the upper right.  I ran out of that ammo trying to hit the board at 100m.

PMC Precision 75Gr. Match:

Reliably the tightest group, but the zero is way off from where it was previously.  Could the quick-detach be catching up to me?  Could the magnifier be moving the zero?

Sellier & Bellot 55Gr. SP:

I seem to be missing one (the whole in the right not belonging to me).

Tul Ammo 55Gr. FMJ:

With the exception of the shot that went wide on the left, this wasn’t a bad group.  I actually haven’t been disappointed with the performance of the ultra-cheap Russian ammo.  Too bad the steel cases are so hard on the rifle.

Okay, let’s do a side-by-side comparison.  Picture sizes have been approximately adjusted to match target sizes.

XM855:

Black Hills Seconds:

Black Hills SP:

Tul Ammo:

PMC Precision:

Sellier & Bellot:

My off-hand estimation is that the magnifier has made me slightly more consistent at 50m, although that could be a marginal improvement in technique or just day-to-day variation.  But dagnabit, I bought a magnifier to make me more consistent at 100m!