Good morning everyone, this is John with gun.deals, and today we're going to be taking a look at one of the best, if not the best, cheap red dots on the market. This is going to be in direct contention with the Sig Romeo 5 as the best big name but budget red dot on the market.
Full disclosure on the Holosun 403B is that I have no relationship with Holosun whatsoever. I have reviewed a lot of their products in the past, a lot that I like and some that I like a little bit less. I paid around 170-180 bucks for it at my local Shields, however, you could probably find a deal at it at certain websites around the internet in the low $100 range and sometimes right at 99 bucks.
Getting into what is the Holosun 403b, this is an Aimpoint T1/T2 style optic, so it is a micro red dot 20 mm window, which is a little small but it does work, I know a lot of people like bigger windows, but this one here is the standard 20 mm footprint. On the boy itself it's made out of 6061 T6 aluminum, which is perfectly fine, industry standard for more budget red dots. In terms of controls on the top we have a plus and a minus button for going through our brightness settings, and we have windage and elevation that are capped. The caps for windage and elevation also double as our adjustment tools, and I believe the clicks on the turrets themselves are about half MOA. Underneath the body of the optic, in between it and the mount, we have our battery tray on the side, which houses our 2032. Battery life itself is rated at 50,000 hours, however, that is also comboed with Auto On/Auto Off technology, which should theoretically provide a battery life in years and not months or hours.
A couple notes about the battery tray itself is that it is o-ring sealed so it should in theory still provide good weather resistance, and water resistance as well. However, I have heard people complain about the tiny little screws that hold it in place, there are two screws that hold in thebattery tray that fits underneath the optic body, I have heard of people stripping those out fairly easily, they are very, very small and the tool that comes with it from Holosun, which is a nice thing to include, does work, but you do want to be very careful and don't over torque them, otherwise you could very, very easily strip them out, so you do want to be a little bit careful with the battery tray itself.
Getting into the mount, the mount is one of those standard things that you'll find on the low end Holosun series and the Sig Romeo 5 is a very, very simple, piece of aluminum with a single smallish bolt that goes into a small locking block on the other side, there is no recoil lug or anything like that to help it hold to your rifle and provide a better return to zero, because it is just that crossbolt that's doing all the work, and you have a very small steel locking block on the other side that doesn't provide all that much area for clamping. So, the mount is not great, but for the money you can swap it out to a variety of other mounts that will do a better job.
Getting into the dot and glass quality, the dot itself in this case is a red 2 MOA dot, which when you're outside looks very, very good. When you're in lower light environments it tends to bloom out a little bit as most red dots do, however, it is very nice looking, very precise. The glass itself doesn't have much warping or tinting to it, there is a little bit of a noticeable blue Notch filter, but other than that looks just fine. The glass quality is fine, it's not warping or overly distorted, it looks decent, especially for the money, and the dot has a very constant refresh rate, which is nice. One small issue with the dot itself that it does have a little bit of glare and when you turn it to the maximum brightness you get a very ugly ring around the optic, however, that just means you need to manage your brightness appropriately.
The glare on the Holosun 403b is not as bad as I've seen it on other Holosun models and it really depends on the light source, where you're looking, angles, all that sort of fun stuff. Most of the time there's no glare, however, if you're in about a 30 degree window, looking at the sun or any other bright light source, there is a possibility of getting some glare in the image, it's not quite as noticeable as it is on camera as the red dot is usually much further away from your face than when you're having to balance it in front of a camera. So, the glass quality is good, the dot quality is good, the body and mount really couldn't get any simpler. However, it still retains your extremely small lightweight package and a battery life of 50,000 hours or longer with that Auto On/ Auto Off technology.
Getting into using the Holosun 403b, well, as you might expect for any micro red dot it is extremely effective up close, that dot is very, very quick to pick up. I don't have much if any astigmatism, so your mileage may vary in terms of how the dot looks to you, if you have some sort of mild to severe astigmatism, however, for me it's incredibly easy to pick up, the light transmission is good enough that even in low light you can still find it very quickly and it still looks very good. Parallax is technically set at 100 yards so that is where it theoretically will be its best, however, even closer than that, shooting around, cover in odd position, so on and so forth, never really seem to be an issue. So, when it comes to actually using the dot I don't really have any complaints, it's just kind of your standard 20 mm red dot.
I didn't do any durability testing on this optic in terms of drop test because I know exactly how it's going to perform. The mount itself is going to shift and it won't maintain zero, but these body styles, even just with the 6061 aluminum bodies, they're so small and compact and such a strong design that they will essentially never break. Don't be too disappointed that I didn't do drop testing on this optic because coming up I will do a dedicated video on drop testing these smaller micro red dots to just to show how durable the bodies are.
When it comes to value and how it compares to its competitors in this price bracket, it's going to hold up very well against all of the budget Sig red dots, all the budget Vortex red dots, and even the other budget Holosun dots that sit right next to it. Basically, if you find one for a good deal that's cheaper than the rest go for it, if it's more expensive where you are or where you're looking at for some reason probably go with one of the other dots as they all perform very, very similarly, which is a good thing, they all have a very high performance, a very high value for their cost, so if you're comparing this versus the Sig Romeo 5 and the Vortex Crossfire or whatever their budget red dot is, just get the one that's cheapest and you're going to be getting the best value.
The one thing that I would recommend on basically all of those red dots is that you find an acceptable mount that is going to hold zero and perform a little bit better than the stock mount, however, the stock mount will hold zero with most calibers just sitting on your gun, just got to keep in mind that over time, taking it on and offor if it experiences a sharp impact, it's not going to hold zero as well as nicer mounts will.
A lot of people have told me that this optic is their favorite budget red dot, I would still say mine overall is the Sig Romeo 5, but maybe that's just because I've been using mine for years and years at this point. However, I can totally see why people would put this slightly above and it really is just going to come down to your personal preference and whatever price you end up finding on a lot of these budget red dots. That's about all I got on the Holosun 403B, very simple review, very similar to a lot of other red dots in this price category and it performs as expected.
