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.

For situations where quick aiming is at a premium, today's new crop of electronic and low/non-magnifying optical sights provide the best of both worlds. They are generally much smaller and shorter than traditional scope sights, and block much less of the hunter's peripheral vision. They allow fast, heads-up both-eyes-open aiming, and become subjectively invisible to the shooter in use except for the floating aiming point or reticle. Due to the optical qualities of their projected or holographic internal aiming points, they are effectively parallax-free; meaning so long as you can see the dot or reticle against the target through the sight, it does not matter whether it is off-center up/down/right/left in the field of view, you're on-target.

They also have near-infinite eye-relief, and there is no black-out as happens with a traditional scope when the aiming eye is not precisely aligned with optical axis of the lens system. This translates into much greater flexibility and speed in aiming because you don't need to always repeat an exactly perfect head position and eye-alignment when bringing up your gun. They also provide perfect focus on the sight and target whether your eye is age 18 or 80.

The only thing they don't provide, in fact, is high magnification. Which is pretty much irrelevant anyway in any situation where instant sight-alignment is really needed. Whenever a target is so far away that great magnification is a true benefit, you'll have all the time you need to find and steady on its image through a conventional scope sight--even with one eye closed.

There are three general types of modern non-conventional optical sights, generally categorized as Electronic Dot Sights, Reflex Sights and Holographic Sights. All are widely available from a variety of manufacturers, and today seen on a rapidly-expanding number of hunting firearms in the field (as well as on a huge range of military and tactical weapons). In configuration they range from the size of a small frozen orange juice can to units scarcely bigger than the first joint of your thumb. Here's a brief explanation of the basic types, and some of the more popular and notable examples appropriate for hunters.

Electronic "Dot" Sights
Electronic dot sights are typically tubular in design, from tiny 3/4-inch units to the diameter of a beer can, and feature conventional small windage/elevation adjustment knobs. Dot brightness can be adjusted by a dial (typically 10 or 11 different settings). The most technologically advanced current dot sights from companies like TruGlo feature selectable reticle configurations for different types of targets, and even switchable reticle colors (red or green) to accommodate different ambient light conditions and target backgrounds. Some versions even feature low-level magnification for additional target image precision. Battery life in the best quality units currently produced by AimPoint (which remains an industry leader) now reach 50,000 hours on a setting of seven or below out of 10.

On the small-to-tiny side, there are electronic dot units like the five-ounce Zeiss Z-Point, which extends battery life with a solar cell in daytime use and automatically adjusts brightness for light conditions, and the 3.7-ounce AimPoint Micro H-1, both specifically designed for hunting. I use small dot sights regularly on hunting handguns, and personally favor the bigger "beer can" units for wingshooting shotguns for maximum heads-up peripheral-vision awareness. Regardless of size, it is important to understand that dot sights utlize an LED to project an aiming point internally. They do not project a laser external of the sight.

Reflex Sights
Technically speaking, the term reflex sight refers to any optical sight that reflects a reticle image (or images) onto a combining glass for superimposition on the target. So any of these dot sight are technically reflex sights. In practice, however, the reflex sight terminology has come to describe such sights that are not battery-powered, and thus differentiated from electronic dot sights. Illumination in reflex sights is provided by ambient light, an internal passive illumination material such as Tritium, or can be fed by a fiber-optic light gatherer, or by a combination of both.

Similar to electronic sights, reflex sights use refractive or reflective optical collimator to generate an image of a luminous or reflective reticle, which is reflected off a dichroic mirror or beam splitter to allow the viewer to see the field of view and a reflection of the projected reticle. If no magnification is utilized, this gives the viewer a theoretically parallax-free image of the reticle, superimposed over the field of view at infinity.

The current leader in reflex sight technology is Trijicon, whose newly introduced Ruggedized Miniature Reflex (RMR) is about half the size of a pack of lifesavers, durable under the most extreme conditions, fully adjustable for windage and elevation, and available either with or without an integrated fiber-optic light feed for maximum brightness even under the dimmest light conditions. Trijicon uses this same technology to illuminate the reticle in its AccuPoint line of conventional hunting scopes. I've fallen in love with this little gem with it's integrated Weaver-type mount attachment for use on handguns, shotguns and medium-range hunting rifles alike.

Holographic Sights
Battery-powered holographic sights, invented and pioneered by EOTech as the Holographic Weapon Sight (HWS) and subsequently adopted by Bushnell in its popular HoloSight, are the most technically advanced of all present new-generation optical hunting sights. The technology is admittedly complex. Holography is described scientifically as a wavefront reconstruction process. Unlike a camera, which forms and records a two-dimensional image of an object on film, a hologram records and then reconstructs the light field propagating from a three-dimensional object. EOTech says that a good analogy is the recording and playback of sound, wherein sound waves are encoded and recorded on a disk. With proper decoding, the original sound waves are reconstructed.

In holography, the light field is encoded in the form of an interference pattern and recorded as refractive index variations on a clear window. The decoding is achieved by illuminating the hologram with laser light, and the light field propagating from the object to the hologram window is reconstructed. Thus, a viewer cannot tell if the three-dimensional image he sees is live or a holographic reconstruction. The laser beam, incidentally, is by necessity very low-level, contained completely within the sight unit and not reflected back into the user's eye. It merely serves to create the holographic image of the reticle that the shooter perceives.

A holographic sight constructs a reticle that is projected out to the target plane by using a large, high quality aberration-free lens. The reticle image can be of any light pattern, any geometric shape or size, and produced in either two-dimensional or three-dimensional form. The holographic reticle is uniformly bright and distortion-free regardless of image size. A parallax free image is created with a large and bright aiming pattern allowing quick target acquisition. At the same time, it can produce an aim point as small as the human eye can resolve to achieve the highest aiming accuracy possible without magnification.

EOTech's consumer-available hunting HWS uses state-of-the-art digital electronics design with 20 brightness levels for use from low light or bright sunlight. An on-board microprocessor provides an automatic battery check indicator, up/down brightness scrolling and programmable auto shutdown features. All electronics are fully encapsulated in shock absorbing resin. The holographic patterns have been designed to be instantly visible in any light, instinctive to center regardless of shooting angle. Reticles are designed as large, see-through patterns for quick target acquisition without covering or obscuring the point of aim.

Uniquely, all the information required to reconstruct a holographic reticle image is recorded everywhere in the visible display window. If the window is obstructed by mud, snow, rain, or even cracked, an EOTech HWS or Bushnell HoloSight remains fully operational, with point of aim/impact maintained. As long as the hunter can see through any portion of the window, the entire reticle pattern is visible on target, even at the extreme corners or edges of the field of view with zero parallax.

Yes, the HoloSight looks odd to the eyes of those wedded to traditional scope sights, or even to those accustomed to the look of almost-now-conventional electronic dot sights. Like all new-generation hunting sights, it really, really, works.

I'm sold on them all.