Scope geekery!

[Lozart]

As some of you will know I drop tested my M14 and royally borked my scope. The one I had isn't sold anymore (Victoptics 1-4x24 First Focal Plane) and its nearest equivalent is way more than I paid for mine in the first place (inflation, eh? What ya gonna do? etc).

 

So that has led me into a bit of a rabbit warren of technical nerdery looking at similar scopes that fit my current budget (around £100 ish and no, I'm not looking for "buy a Visionking they am bestest" as a response). The bit I'm confounded by is when I start getting into eye relief, exit pupil, twilight factor and relative brightness; one scope I've seen is 1-6x24 and has a TF of 12 and RB of 16 at max magnification, the other is 1-4x20 and has a TF of 9 and an RB of 25 at max. Now, the thing is that in both cases the bigger the number is, the better the image will be but as the two scopes are the opposite way around on both, which is better - a higher twilight factor (given that I mostly play woodland and even on a bright day tree cover reduces the light level somewhat) or better relative brightness? I've usually gone down the route that a bigger objective is always better but it's the smaller one that seems to have a brighter image in this case.

 

Anyone have any insight?

[Lozart]

Seems I may have answered my own question!

 

I'm going to leave this thread up though as it may help others; scopecalc.com lets you put in your scopes info and then maps out the brightness etc using flash player (so you'll need an emulator but there's some good plugins around for chrome).

 

Basically it would seem that at any magnification I'm likely to use the two perform pretty much the same in terms of light transmission and usable image but (as suspected) the one with the larger objective gives a better size of image.

 

Pics below for the rest of the nerds here! linky to calculator