Zeiss is actually one of the few scope manufacturers that really tests products for compliance before shipping. Vibration and water ingress tests are the most invasive of any brand I’ve seen personally. These are the actual two leading causes for loss of zero and scope failure.
Do you understand that shaking/vibrating a scope the way the Zeiss, Leupold, etc do does absolutely nothing to tell you about erector stability? It only says that a lens didn’t fall out; it does not tell you if the scope maintained zero through the vibration.
“Drop” tests are honestly silly to use as metric. No drop test is repeatable
Incorrect. It can be very repeatable. Why don’t you try it?
and you’ll have a hard time finding any scope manufacturers building an aiming device with a “drop” spec built into it.
You have a hard time because people don’t think it matters- just like your doing. However, there are multiple scopes by at least two brands, and there have been multiple military trails that tested and required zero retention with drops. Ironically only two scopes have passed those trails and been adopted. One is not available to the public at, the others only available in limited numbers- yet a close to identical commercial version is available.
Vibration frequency and hertz and IP rating are testable and repeatable every time.
And tell you absolutely nothing about whether that scope held zero through it.
Shit happens in the field and minor impacts shouldn’t lose zero (see Leupold and Vortex)
Correct, and yet it can be shown over and over and over with those two scopes above (line agnostic) that they shift, on the exact same rifles, with the exact same rings that do not shift with others.
Meopta who makes the conquest line for Zeiss is held to the same ISO compliance as Zeiss. Myself, my friend, and my father in law have owned close to 15 or so MeoPros and Zeiss Conquests since they’ve been released. 10’s of thousands of rounds and no mechanical failures yet. Also verified tracking tests have shown very precise turret mechanisms.
And yet they shift with side impacts as well. Try it.
More accurate than nightforce who everyone claims are the kings of “accurate dialing”.
Who claims that? Certainly not me. NF NXS/ATACR/BEAST absolutely do have less failures when seen in large numbers when used heavily than any other major scopes made. The NX8’s are more issue prone (though almost never with zero retention) than any of the other above NF’s and yet have fewer issues than the Zeiss V4 orders of magnitude.
In your drop tests I’m curious, as I’ve dinged and dropped a couple of mine in the field… Does the “zero loss” happen to come from landing on the windage turret side? Is it “way off” or are minor adjustments needed after? What is the drop distance and onto what surface?
The base eval is outlined in the Tanget Theta thread I did. Zero shifts happen most often with most scopes from parallax side, and top impacts. How much zero shift is dependent on particular scopes. The Zeiss V4’s I mentioned above were variable in amount- most experienced a shift of .5 moa to 2 moa from side impacts from 18”. Not one would hold zero through the multiple 18” drops- not to say that there isn’t a V4 that would hold zero.
We used to offer a “2 meter pole drop” spec on a 5 year warranty of one of our GNSS receivers about 10 years ago. We built the thing like a brick and it could take a beating but we found the field to be much “harsher” on the units, especially right around the 4.5 year mark magically. What I’m saying is, guys are really good and making things fail in the field when they want them to fail. Impact and drop testing is completely unpredictable.
That is correct. Which is why I and some others started dropping optics and seeing what happened- we were tired of failures in use. That eventually turned into a process that is very repeatable. Scopes that hold zero from what I outlined in the TT thread don’t fail- well, except for the lone Meopta Optika 6. That’s hundreds of scopes with heinous use, with round counts that people do not believe are possible.
