FOV vs eye relief

[eric1115]

I'm listening to Rifles Only Accuracy Podcast, Season 3 Episode 4 Buck is Back.

https://www.podbean.com/ea/pb-qdubx-13a3a94

Jacob's guest works for Leupold (not sure I caught in exactly what capacity). I think he's the same guy who was talking a few months ago on the Backcountry Hunting podcast about Leupold's durability and how light scopes were better for durability. Also I think he was on Beyond the Kill with similar points.

Anyway, he was talking about optical design and saying that eye relief and FOV were essentially on a sliding scale where improvement to one must come at the expense of the other. Obviously they can both be bad with poor optical design, but they cannot both be amazing no matter how much money/design you throw at it.

Thoughts? It seems to me like he tends to consistently present arguments that are designed to put critics on the defensive.

"Actually, the light weight helps with durability!"

"Actually, it's good that the reticle is off at 100 yards, if it was collimated at 100 it would be way off out where it matters!" -this one seems plausible, but I don't know enough to say. I just have some automatic skepticism with the other stuff he's said and the way he frames his arguments.

"Actually, the VX3 is one of the brightest, most durable scopes on the market since it has fewer elements and lenses than most wide mag range scopes!"

 

[Shō[t]gun]

It's easy to be a contrarian when you don't have to answer to the masses in the podcast studio. Leupold loves to shit on Vortex but they have the same exact business model. Talk your stuff up like crazy and advertise everywhere you can. The target audience are the ones who don't know the difference between what's out there and what they paid for.
As far as the eye relief and FOV, that's advertised in the specs of every scope on the market so it should be pretty easy to compare/contrast on any optics site. I may be dead wrong here but I remember reading about tube size being more important than objective diameter for FOV in scopes, so if two scopes had the same power range, objective size, and eye relief but were 1" vs 30mm that could prove him wrong if the 30mm had better FOV.

 

[Beetroot]

FOV is tied to eye relief if you are talking about the same size eye piece being closer or nearer to the shooters eye, there are a few Hawke rifle scopes available in differing eye relief (some much shorter designed for air rifles) that a get a much wider FOV the shorter the eye relief.

If you are comparing different designs then that is not the case, there are plenty of wide FOV scopes that have a normal amount of eye relief, they are just designed that way.
March have two different eye piece designs they use one is notably wider that the other, not due to eye relief but due to the optical design.