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The knob itself does block your view of the side focus knob, but this is much more desirable than blocking the view of the elevation or windage knobs. There are 11 brightness levels, 12 if you count 0, which are clearly marked on the knob as well as very positive detents as you click to the different settings. Just ahead of the power ring and on the left of the scope is the illuminated reticle brightness adjustment knob. The eye relief is generous and there should not be any problems using the scope on higher power rifles. But the use of the first focal plane reticle diminishes the need to know exactly what power the scope is set to.
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The numbers on the ring are flat and not easily read from behind the scope, requiring just a minor lifting of the head to see where you are at. It is very smooth and requires the same amount of force throughout the adjustment range.
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It provides excellent grip and the power ring itself provides a good feel, not too stiff to making adjusting difficult, but yet stiff enough to keep it from moving to easily by accident. Just ahead of the eye piece is the power adjust ring which has a rubber ring around it with serrations and a single larger protruding knob, all to aide with gripping the power ring while behind the scope. It adjusts through the standard dioptre range and allows you to focus the reticle to your particular eyes, with or without glasses. The rear eye piece has a fast focus eye piece that is smooth and fairly easy to rotate. The matte anodized finish is just about right with minimal reflection, though that nice crisp lettering (probably laser etched) does stand out quite well and is easy to see, both by the operator and anyone else. It is a very nice looking scope, not that that is important, but hey, we all like our equipment to look good as well. The tube is 34mm, which most of the S&B scopes are, and the lines with the 42mm objective look good. It just has a feeling of precise engineering and manufacturing, something the Germans are well known for. The finish is very uniform and even across the entire scope, the machining is very precise, the lettering crisp and clear, as well as many other quality touches. We have been extremely impressed with all of the S&B scopes we have used and we expected no different from this one, but we figured we had better run it through our set of tests just to be sure.Īs with all of the S&B scopes that we have handled, this scope has a nice solid feel to it and everything seems to say “quality”. It is also setup with MilRad knob adjustments. The 4-16x42mm version this time around has different knobs, illuminated reticle, as well as a different reticle. We had a great time reviewing the last Schmidt & Bender scope we had here so we figured it would not hurt to take a look at another one and see how it compared.