High-Tech Sights

It used to be that there were only two types of sights that anyone would think to use on a hunting rifle, shotgun, or handgun: either conventional open sights with a front blade and a rear notch, or a conventional scope sight. Today's advances in miniaturized electronic and microprocessors have given rise to a wide variety of new non-conventional, small-format, non-magnifying or low-magnification optical sights which combine many of the benefits of both open sights and traditional scopes into a single unit, and have also added remarkable functionality to conventional-format scope sights as well.

The primary advantage of this new generation of sights for hunters is quick target acquisition, combined with simultaneous instant focus of the hunter's eye on both the sights and the target. The main benefit of open sights has always been their capability for fast shots, without the need to search for the target through the tube of a scope sight. The disadvantage of open sights is that they require the hunter's eye to align three different objects--the rear sight, front sight and target--which are at different distances from the eye. For younger eyes, this is not a particular problem, but as a hunter's eyes mature and their focal range decreases, it becomes increasingly difficult (and eventually impossible) to effectively resolve the front and rear sight at the same time. One or the other will be blurred-out to the point where the eye reflexively tries to switch focus back and forth between them, eliminating the fast target alignment which is the real reason for using them in the first place. Only such modifications to the old peep sight system such as the ghost ring designs now being offered on some traditional rifle designs offer a partial remedy.

On the other hand, the main benefit of a traditional scope sight, regardless of its magnification, is the fact that its reticle effectively combines the front and rear sight into a single alignment point, and puts that point at the same focal distance from the eye as the image of the target as seen through the scope. When the scope's eyepiece is properly focused, both the reticle and the target are perceived as crisp and clear, regardless of the age of the hunter's eye. The disadvantage to using a scope sight is the aiming eye is drawn to only one point on the gun, with the body of the scope blocking the natural barrel alignment that comes with a front and rear sight, making it more difficult (and slower) to find the target through the scope's tube, requiring more practice by the hunter to become adept at mounting his gun for a quick and natural alignment with any target situation that might present itself.

This problem becomes greater with the reduced field-of-view of higher-magnification scopes, due to the natural tendency of the shooter to close his non-aiming eye due to the its visual disparity with the magnified image seen through the scope with the aiming eye. It takes lots of practice for a hunter to train himself to automatically keep both eyes open when aiming through a scope with anything greater than 1.5X magnification in a fast-shot situation. Most hunters simply never learn to do it.