I’ve reviewed a wide variety of LPVOs. And while many offer different features, reticles, and levels of glass clarity, one of the most common complaints people have with LPVOs is the distortion they see at low power. To add to the confusion, some LPVO makers intentionally design their scopes to show a larger field of view (FOV) through their scope, causing the perception that their scopes feel more “fish eye”. Moreover, some cheap LPVOs have uneven sharpness in their lens, creating additional distortions. At times, looking through an LPVO at 1x feels less like looking through a pane of glass and more like looking through a glass bottle.

Some of this distortion can be corrected by adjusting the diopter, but you can only adjust so much. I also noticed that with some LPVOs at 1x, objects look slightly offset from their position in the real world. It doesn’t matter if the scope costs over $2000 or less than $200, I will sometimes get a scope that doesn’t show an image aligned to its background.

But the odd thing is that when I rotate this “defective” mora than 90º in my hand, it seems to correct the effect. At SHOT Show, I stopped by the Trijicon booth (a company known for making combat-proven optics) and looked through their Credo LPVO, and it had that image shift issue I was describing. The effect was greatly reduced when looking through the Credo with the tube upside down! I asked a Trijicon technical staffer to explain this to me, but they shrugged and said they didn’t know what I was talking about.

I reached out to my friend, Dark Lord of Optics. There were too many confounding factors for him to diagnose the situation based on just my photos and videos. He suspects that I may not have adjusted the diopter properly for the camera (which I disagree). It could also be that the reticle and turrets were not optically centered or the elements were not assembled correctly.

I asked him if scope makers check for this issue at the factory. He said that scope factories center the turrets mechanically, but do not test for optical center. One thing that never occurred to me was that FFP (and some SFP) reticles are etched onto the lens and that the turrets move the reticle crosshairs by moving the entire lens. I tested one of the LPVOs that I thought had an image shift “out of the box”. I turned the turrets and discovered that it also shifted the overall image. This is only noticeable at 1x, which is why I only noticed this “defect” in LPVOs!

So the Trijicon Credo I looked at at SHOT Show probably wasn’t defective. There are hundreds of people touching and messing with the demo scopes at the expo. Somebody who was testing out the demo optic may have turned the turrets a rotation or even two. Even if they reset the turret number to “0” the image I was wasn’t optically, visually centered.

Now I know. And as G.I. said, knowing is half the battle.

SHOP

Trijicon Credo: https://amzn.to/3IdfKi2

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