Airgunning

     MTC Viper 6-24x56IR SCB       

Introduction

There has been a lot of talk about the MTC Viper scopes, with people stating these scopes are good value for money.  So I wanted to know if these scopes were indeed as good and I was able to pick up a secondhand MTC Viper 6-24x56IR SBC.  For the money, the scope comes with everything one can wish: mounts, sunshade, flip-ups, bigger sidewheel, illuminated crosshairs, target turrets, ... So far so good.

Optics

But the most important thing a scope should have is missing: good optics. It's just unbelievable how bad these optics are.  They miss clarity and contrast and the image is milky on every magnification except the lowest, and even then eye positioning is very critical to get some kind of clear image.  This is all very disappointing. I do like the crosshairs though.

Rangefinding

We can be short here, rangefinding is just not possible.  When you try to focus on the target, the image goes from out of focus to really not sharp to not really sharp and back out of focus again.  And there's always a haze, not only at the highest magnification but on every magnification above 10x, it's like looking at your target through a thick fog.  I've never seen a scope with optics this milky !

Conclusion

A waste of money !

For a moment I thought I got a bad copy of this scope, but 2 fellow shooters bought this scope new around the same time I bought mine, and one of them had a look through the scope, put it back in the box and send it back; the other one tried to get on with it for a coupled of weeks but gave up and sold the scope. So it seems it's not just a matter of a bad copy.

April 12,2009 by Mario Severi