You are going to get both sides of the fence depending on the site. Some will have absolutely nothing good to say about them......and evidently the first generation or two had issues with their internal components. The latest generation appears to have them addressing a lot of their past weaknesses. A second area that has caused some irritation is the fact that scopes with issues need to be sent back to Romania to get fixed or replaced.....which takes some time.
Having said all this....they use Schott glass, just like Zeiss, Scmidt&Bender, Premier Heritage/Tangent Theta. IOR has also had a long term working relationship with Zeiss....and I think this has benefitted them in terms of coatings.
I owned an early second gen. scope and experienced some problems with my elevation adjustments. I currently own one of the latest generation scopes and have been completely satisfied. My only beef with it is there is some tunneling on the low end of magnification.......which has been well documented for the 6-24X. I think the glass and coatings are top tier....and hopefully the internals are getting there as well. I would say I appreciate the glass and coatings more than I did my NightForce BR and NXS scope.......not sure what the new HD lenses are like in NF so I can't compare to their latest. I will say NightForce is near the top in terms of the whole package being built tough and having warranty/CS second to none.
I think IOR can be / is a potentially huge bargain in top tier optics. They do come with some baggage that a consumer has to be aware of. I think they are addressing issues over time......but they need to beef up support in the U.S. They compare very favorably with NightForce.....and they compare very favorably ,optical image clarity and color rendition ( my impression) with that of my Premier Heritage scopes and Kahles K 624i.
Good Luck.....Pretty hard to beat a NightForce.....but IOR can be a real player if they can build on a reputation of building robust scopes with their great glass/coatings.
Wayne
