You lost some of us ! Could you explain "off axis chromatic aberration" and "glare performance"? Don't really know how you could pick up a scope inside a building and come up with these conclusions. Good enough for target but not for hunting?Most of the target guys I shoot with might think the opposite! I would put either of these scopes up against the best in target or hunting, low light or bright glaring light. I've shot in all these conditions and haven't been disapointed yet! If you ever get the chance, look through one side by side on the range with any other scope, that is the only fair way to judge their respective abilities!
Sorry about the jargon. Yes, a good measurement of optical performance requires specialized equipment. I have that equipment but it's not portable. So I've also developed a couple of test procedures that I can do by visual inspection if the lighting is right. They're not quantitative, but they give me a good idea how the scope will perform in the lab.
The first test is for veiling glare, which is light that scatters off the interior surfaces of the scope: the tube, edges of lenses, etc. This scattered light lowers the image contrast. Glare performance is one of the big differences between good German optics, for example, and lower quality optics. German designers simply have a culture of high standards for glare performance. When you look thorugh a good German optic and the image seems to "pop" out at you, it's the absence of scattered light that gives the image such high contrast. There are other sources of scattered light, but glare is often the biggest.
My visual test requires a bright light surrounded by darkness. A streetlight at night works well. So do the halogen spot lights hanging from the ceiling in the large halls at the Sands Convention Center, which is where the SHOT Show is held. The ceiling in those halls is painted flat black. I look through the scope near, but not directly at, the bright light. My eye must be centered in the exit pupil for this test to work, so it helps if the scope is mounted on something to help me keep it aligned with my eye. Glare is then easily seen against the darkness of the sky or the black ceiling. The small conference rooms at the Sands are terrible for this test because they use indirect lighting and the ceiling is off-white.
The second test is for optical aberrations that degrade image resolution. Aberrations result from compromises in the optical design that are motivated by a need to reduce cost. Aberrations usually cause the image to be blurred as you look away from the center of the field of view. In a really good optical design these aberrations are "corrected" and the image has high resolution across the entire field of view. Again my visual test requires a bright halogen light against a dark background. When I look directly at the light, I see a rainbow effect along the edge of the light. It is usually more pronounced away from the center of field of view. With this test I'm trying to assess the quality of the optical design. I look for one type of aberrration (chromatic) that is easy to see. If this aberration is present, other aberrations are likely to be present as well.
Unfortunately, a live fire range is one of the worse places to judge the optical quality of a scope. There are a few reasons why, but the main one is that turbulence in the air is strong at most ranges and this turbulence severely degrades image resolution. Whenever there are temperature variations in the air, light rays don't actually travel in a straight line, but rather are bent, or "refracted", a tiny amount as they pass through the air. This effect causes the image to lose resolution and contrast, and is called turbulence-induced blur. Most shooters are familiar with "mirage", which has the appearance of wavy lines moving across the target image. This effect is due to the turbulent air moving across the field of view.
The longer the range, or the larger the scope aperture, or the hotter the ground temperature, or the closer to ground these light rays are, then the worse the blur becomes. High turbulence environments are typically those in which the target is near the ground and the terrain in front of the target is flat and in direct sunlight. Typical examples include prairie dog and ground squirrel hunting, and target shooting at a range.
Low turbulence environments are typically where the target is surrounded by shade and elevated above the terrain in front of the target (i.e., on a hillside) and/or the air temperature is low. Typical examples include big game hunting in hilly terrain, at dawn and dusk, or under overcast skies, especially in fall and winter when the sun is low in the sky.
So, the image seen when looking through a scope at targets at the range is usually blurred due to turbulence, not due to the optics in one scope vs another. Any difference in image "quality" between two side-by-side scopes under these conditions is probably due to the scopes having different aperture sizes. It would be much easier to see differences in optical resolution in a side-by-side test if you looked through the scopes at a target across a small valley or canyon on a cool day under an overcast sky.
