| Product |
Price
|
Store | MPN | UPC |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monstrum Tactical | Banshee 1-6x24 LPVO Rifle Scope |
$139.95
|
Bear Creek Arsenal | SB1624-B | - |
See more results
for Monstrum Banshee on Wikiarms.com
Monstrum Banshee 1-10x24 - Sub $200 LPVO
Updated
3 months ago
Good morning, everyone, this is John with gun.deals, and today we're going to be taking a look at one of the cheapest, if not the cheapest 1-10 LPVO on the market. This is the Monstrum 1-10x24 Banshee and it comes in for $180 on sale.
Full disclosure on the Monstrum Banshe 1-10 is that they did send this optic out to me for review, they also sent one of their other 1-10 first focal plane optics as well ‘cuz this is a second focal plane 1-10, so I do have a couple optics in from them to test.
Wikiarms.com Search Engine Results
Want to see your products here? Click this
link.
Powered by Wikiarms.com
Getting into the basics of this optic, this is a 1-10x24 30 mm main tube second focal plane option. The size and weight are actually pretty good, it's about 11 inches long, which is not necessarily long, but it's kind of standard for an LPVO, especially a 1-10 LPVO, and the weight only comes in at a little bit over 17 ounces, which is pretty darn good for just about any LPVO out there. In terms of our windage and elevation we have capture turrets that are in 1/2 MOA increments, which is perfectly fine.
On the left hand side of the optic body we have our illumination settings. This has two different colors, you have red and green, you have 10 total settings, five for each, and this is a standard LED type emitter, so while it gets certainly bright enough for most environments when you're in full daylight, the reticle only looks slightly tinted in whichever color you select, which is perfectly fine, we'll get into the reticle a little bit later on, but the reticle does work, you don't need the illumination for it.
Moving back from there we have our magnification ring, which has a slightly larger than 180° throw, it does work fairly fine, it does have a little raised throw lever on it if you will, it's fairly smooth, it does have a little bit of grit in there, but overall not a big deal. Last thing on the optic body is we have the rear diopter for adjusting the reticle to your eyes.
Getting into actually using the thing, let's go ahead and start off with eye relief. Like most LPVOs starting off at 1X you have a very forgiving up, down, left, and right, as well as forward and back, so in terms of usability at 1X it's actually surprisingly good for such a inexpensive optic with such a high magnification range. On the flip side of that, however, as you go up the magnification range it does get very, very tight very quickly, that is one of the downsides of most LPVOs in general, especially 1-10s, especially 1-10s with only a 30 mm main tube rather than any thicker 34 mm main tube, which gives you a little bit larger of an objective lens, which will allow it to be maybe about 20% larger of an exit pupil, so it can be a little bit more forgiving on the back end.
And the Monstrum Banshee does not avoid any of those downsides, so as you get beyond say 6X magnification, the up, down, left, and right, forward, and back tightens up considerably, and at 10X if you're not in a stable position, if you're shooting off hand or from any sort of unsupported position, it's going to be much more difficult to actually get a usable sight picture out of it.
Talking about our field of view, the field of view in this optic is actually quite good, I believe at 1X it is rated for 117 feet, which is very good, and then that is going to diminish as you go up to about 18 feet at 10X, which is still very good given its magnification.
Talking about the reticle that we have in here, this is a pretty simple BDC reticle, so you have hash drops out to about 700 yards using 14.5/16-inch 5.56. This is on a 14.5 6.5 Creedmoor, so not quite going to line up the same way as a 5.56 will, but the BDC is very simple and will get you out to about 700 yards.
Talking about the rest of the reticle you do have an outer horseshoe to kind of draw your eye to the center. In the center you have an 1 MOA dot at 10X magnification, which is precise enough if you did want to for zeroing purposes or if you did want to dial with it for some reason, that is precise enough to take out to distance, if you really wanted to.
Getting into the glass quality and the way the image looks starting out with the 1X performance, at 1X the image quality is all right, it is certainly not the flattest or truest 1X image that I've seen from an LPVO. Given its price it is certainly all right, the image is bright enough, there's enough detail in there, it's not going to hold you back all that that much at 1X, especially in good lighting conditions I should say. However, as you go up the magnification range there is a very noticeable optical degradation, especially in low light or suboptimal conditions. For instance, the second time I took out this optic I was trying to shoot at targets at distance in the fog, so very low visibility, fairly dark as well, and the optical quality at the higher end 10/8X magnification just looked very, very muddy and very dim.
What I ended up doing was dialing back to about 6X magnification where the optical degradation was less noticeable, you also get more field of view, it's also a little bit more usable the lower you are in the magnification range, and at 6X it was much easier to pick up and engage my targets in admittedly very suboptimal conditions, it was about 30 minutes before sunset in very, very heavy fog, and to engage targets in those conditions the glass quality at the top end is very lackluster. And I do wanted to make a note of this is I do see a lot of glass comparisons, both on Monstrum’s website and floating around online, almost all of those are nonsense and taken in perhaps the best case scenario for one optic, and you got to remember taking a picture of an optic if everything is not standardized perfectly. I can make a $2,000 optic look very, very bad, and I can make a $200 optic look very good. I would take picture comparisons online with a grain of salt.At this point in time I'm only at a few hundred rounds of 6.5 Creedmoor on this optic, I am going to be doing more testing on both optics, give you a dedicated review on the other optic as well, and then probably a wrap up with dedicated durability testing on both at some point in the future.
When we bring it back to the value discussion of a sub $200 1 to10 LPVO, that does technically work. It can appear on paper as a very high value option, you do get a lot of magnification for not that much money. However, the optic is most usable from 1-6X magnification and Monstrum actually makes a 1-6X version of this optic, a 1-8X version as well, and both of those are cheaper. I want to say, the 1-6 version, which is essentially the exact same optic, same reticle, all of that is only 130 bucks, so if you're already on a super tight budget, say under $200, you're probably better off with the 1-6 version, which has the exact same feature set just a shorter magnification range for less money, but it's the most usable part of that magnification range.
The 1-6X version also has a couple different reticle options, you can actually get a fiber-wire daylight-bright reticle like the Primary Arms Nova reticles, you can actually get that in their 1-6 version for, I think, about 130 bucks, and it's going to do really well in that 0 to 400 yard use case. This optic, while it does technically have 10X magnification on the top end, it's not what I would consider to be the most usable, and especially when only paired with a simple BDC, I don't think you're going to be getting the most out of that magnification. Personally, I would rather you get a more usable 1-6 or 1-8X version and then save a little bit of extra money rather than get something that's technically has more magnification, but it's really not any more usable, and at the distances you're probably shooting with it isn't going to matter all that much.
On paper this does seem like a good value, but I think in general I would prefer the 1-6 or 1-8X models over the 1-10, even though it has more magnification on paper.
