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Great Optic, Terrible Value - Steiner P4Xi
Updated
10 months ago
Good morning, everyone, this is John with gun.deals, and today we're going to be taking a look at a fantastic little LPVO that's in a bit of an odd spot when it comes to its value proposition, at least currently.
Full disclosure on this optic, we have absolutely no relationship with Steiner whatsoever. However, this is the OpticsPlanet modification, the OPMOD FDE, which does look fantastic and the reason for that is because OpticsPlanet did send it out for me to review, so I don't have a relationship with Steiner, they didn't send it out, they don't know I'm making the video, but I didn't pay for the optic either because I did get it from OpticsPlanet to review, so thanks to those guys for sending it out.
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Getting into the basics on the Steiner P4 XI, we do have a 1-4X magnification range, we have a 30-millimeter main tube and a 24-millimeter objective lens. As far as size and weight goes, we do get a fairly small and lightweight package, which we'd hope for a 1-4 since we're already sacrificing some magnification, hopefully we get some size and weight back on that.
The length is fairly average, it's a little bit over 10 inches long. The weight, however, is all the way down at 17.3, which is one of the lightest LPVOs on the market and definitely on the lighter weight of scopes in general. It's not a compact optic per se, but it does end up being very nice in terms of size and weight. With the mount and the throw lever, the very nice throw lever that they did include with it, I believe the total weight is about 22-22 and a half ounces, so for an LPVO it's not that bad, keep in mind that we only have a 1-4x magnification.
Externally, as I mentioned, we do have an included throw lever that tightens down on a specific spot on the magnification ring. The magnification ring is 1-4, it is a 180-degree throw, it does have a pretty good amount of resistance, meaning that it is fairly stiff, so it would be much less pleasurable without the included throw lever if you just have just the magnification ring by itself, though it is nicely knurled, you're gonna have a bit of a hard time getting it quickly between 1-4. So, having a throw lever included is definitely a good idea and something that they should do on all of these optics that have this stiff of a magnification ring.
The turrets themselves, nothing special whatsoever, we have capped elevation and windage, you have one half MOA increments in the clicks. The clicks themselves are soft and mushy, not that it really matters all that much because they are definitely a set and forget style of turrets.
On the left-hand side of the optic we have our very interesting illumination dial, so we have three dedicated OFF positions as well as an OFF position in between each setting. The first couple settings are going to be your night vision settings, which do get extremely dim to the naked eye, you basically can't see them whatsoever. So, I assume that those are night vision, although I have not tested how well that actually works, generally speaking LPVOs are a little bit more finicky and not really worth the squeeze for passive aiming, but then we go into our daylight or dusk settings, which I believe are the next four settings, again, there's an OFF in between each one. Then for some reason, in between, you have another dedicated OFF setting and then you go into more of your daylight modes, and you have four daylight settings, which are very, very bright, which we'll get into with the Fiber Wire illumination that we get in this optic, and then at the end you have another dedicated OFF setting. So, you have an OFF in between, three dedicated OFFs, night vision, dusk, and then your daylight settings.
Overall, there are way more settings than you'll ever need, but it's nice, and having an OFF in between is very nice as well because then you can have it on, turn it off and then just if you're one click away from getting back to the right setting.
Now that we've already talked about illumination we might as well get into how that affects the reticle and one of the best things about the optic. So, this optic is using a Fiber Wire illumination, so on basically all of your daylight settings it is actually daylight visible, the reason for that is you actually have a super long, very fine piece of fiber optic pipe in the middle of the optic, and then you have a LED emitter that shines on that and it gets very, very bright. So, on Max it is extremely bright, and when I say red dot bright I do mean red dot bright.
For Fiber Wire illumination it's not the brightest that I've seen, for instance the Primary Arms Nova, which is actually sitting over there right now, is actually a little bit brighter, but it's brighter into almost unnecessary territory where it doesn't really matter. For instance, all the shooting that I've done with this Steiner P4XI has been during full daylight, in very, very bright sunny conditions, and even on Max brightness it is still more than bright enough. It's not overblown like you can get with the Nova, you can always turn the Nova down a little bit, but I'm just saying that it doesn't have quite the top end, though it doesn't really need to have it at least unless you're not in like a white out condition or something like that.
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Product
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Store
MPN
UPC
Primary Arms SLx 1-6x24mm Rifle Scope, 30mm Tube, Second Focal Plane, ACSS Nova Fiber Wire Reticle, Black, 610183
$339.99
Optics Planet
610183
818500018759
Primary Arms SLx 1-6x24mm Rifle Scope, 30mm Tube, Second Focal Plane, ACSS Nova Fiber Wire Reticle, Black, 610183
$339.99
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610183
818500018759
Primary Arms SLx Rifle Scope - 512469
$339.99
MidwayUSA
PA-SLX-1-6X24S-NOVA
818500018759
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The advantage of a Fiber Wire reticle in an LPVO over a red dot is that a 2 MOA red dot is almost never actually 2 MOA, it's somewhere between like three and six MOA most of the time, if you actually measure it out at 100 yards, and on top of that they're not quite perfectly precise, and if you have an astigmatism or some variation of a eye issue they can start to look very bad very quickly, whereas with the illumination on the Fiber Wire optic, the Fiber Wire reticle that is in the Steiner P4XI it is always very, very precise while still being extremely bright and not blooming out quite the same way a red dot would be if you go a little bit higher than you need, even if this is on a higher brightness setting than what you absolutely need for your circumstances, it still does give you a higher level of precision. With a red dot it really doesn't matter inside of 100 yards whether it's a 2 MOA dot or 4 MOA dot, so on and so forth, and if it's a little oblong, if it's not quite perfectly crisp, it doesn't quite matter, but with an LPVO where you're stretching it out to three, four, six hundred yards, having that extra level of precision is very nice.
Getting into the rest of the reticle, because these are wire reticles not etched reticles, you can combo an etched reticle with a Fiber Wire dot, but it is very complicated and expensive. Primary Arms is eventually going to be bringing one to market that combines a Fiber Wire dot with like a mill-grid, hopefully giving you the best of both worlds, having a reticle that works very well up close, is very fast to pick up, very fast to transition with and also allows you to make better, more consistent hits at distance as well.
Getting into the rest of the reticle on the Steiner P4XI, you have some very simple hash marks around the reticle to kind of draw your eye to the center, and then underneath the Fiber Wire dot you have holds for, I believe, three, four, five and six hundred yards, and just very simple little hash marks. It's a very simple reticle, no wind holds, nothing special like that, but it does give you a BDC for going out to distance.
With this optic mounted on this Geissele 11.5, using Callaway Ballistics’ 55 grain remanufactured ammo, you might be shocked to learn that the BDC did not quite land or did not quite line up at 600 yards. It was very easy, three, 400 yards, I believe, with the wind I was holding up and to the left just a little bit, so I was hedging my bets because I knew that it was going to be dropping a little bit more using weaker ammunition on a shorter barrel then this is probably tuned for like a 14.5 or a 16 inch barrel versus a 11.5 in this Geissele. I did take some shots all the way up to 600 yards, but 600 yards with an 11.5, using 55 grain reman ammunition was not the best experience, especially in fairly high winds, so basically the wind was coming left to right and I was aiming at the target at the left and it would be hitting around the target at the right, but I was putting this 600-yard marker about two to three feet above the target on the left to try and hit the target on the right, impacts were not very consistent so it wasn't necessarily the best experience ever, but with a longer barrel, better ballistics for cutting through wind and less drop, that sort of thing, better ammunition as well, that's a lot more efficient at distance, you could definitely use this optic at 600 yards.
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On top of that, let's go ahead and get into the eye relief and eye box, so eye relief, they rated at three and a half to four inches and eye relief is definitely right at probably about that four inch mark, so you have a good amount of usable eye relief, you can back off a little bit, you can go closer a little bit and still get a usable sight picture. It is a little bit shorter in terms of its eye relief than other 1X optics that I've seen on the market, but the flip side of that is that the eye box itself is pretty huge, so you almost get I wouldn't say quite an inch, but you get a very good left, right, up, and down where you still get a usable sight picture through the optic, and that fortunately translates all the way up to 4X as well that even on 4X you still get a very, very usable eye box, so it is very forgiving if you're not perfectly behind the optic at all times, you can still get a good sight picture.
With that you also have a field of view at 1X of 121 feet at 100 yards. If you know my scale, anything above 100 is good, anything above 110 is excellent, and anything above 120 is top tier phenomenal. 121 feet is one of the best out there, it's very, very rare to see anything above 120, let alone 125, 130, so on and so forth, so there are a few optics that do it, that do have 120 plus feet field of view at 1X at 100 yards, and this is among that company, meaning that you do get an immense field of view.
That, combined with the fact that you get a very good, very usable eye relief and eye box also combined with the fact that the 1X is one of the best one X's that I have ever seen, meaning that it is a very flat image, it looks very natural, very true to life because you have a lot of light going through curved glass in here, magic happens and you get an image on the other side. So, it's not really a true representation of 1x, however, it does look very, very good. Personally, I would put it on par with the Vortex Viper PST Gen 2, which has a very, very good 1X on it. That optic, unfortunately, is 30% heavier, but it's also cheaper now because they raised the price on these guys, which is a little bit unfortunate.
So, at 1X on the Steiner P4XI you have a fantastic field of view, you have a very good eye relief and eye box, you also have a very good looking 1X image, which does make it easier to pick up targets, transition, so on and so forth, you also have that Fiber Wire illumination, which is very nice, it allows you to pick it up very quickly, as soon as you look through the scope you know exactly where that little dot is, and it is very, very precise.
The last thing that we need to talk about is the overall glass quality because all of that is well and good, but if the glass quality sucks then it kind of holds back all those other things that are on paper fantastic, fortunately, the glass quality is very good. I couldn't find out exactly where the optical system was made in this optic, whether it's Chinese, Japanese, so on and so forth, but the glass looks very good, it has very good contrast, it's bright enough, it's very crisp, edge to edge, looks very good, almost no chromatic aberration that I could tell, even in painted white targets in full daylight. Reflections looked good, edge to edge, clarity looked good, colors look good, good contrast, good brightness, really not a lot to complain about with the glass.
Some of that is probably down to the fact that it is a very simple optical system, it's a very lightweight package as well that combined with the great field of view and everything else that we've talked about means that at 1X with the Fiber Wire reticle system you get an optic that does very, very well, just about as good as an LPVO can in terms of speed, acquisition, so on and so forth, the Steiner P4XI is towards the top of that stack.
The biggest downside to this optic is that Steiner changed the price on these optics from four to 500 dollars all the way up to like 770 to 800 dollars. 800 dollars is a tough pill to swallow, especially when we have the new Primary Arms Nova, which is a very good optic as well, but that's a 330-dollar optic, so quite literally less than half the cost of this with a 6X top end magnification versus four.
That being said, this optic does do some things better, it's a little bit smaller and lighter first off, so that's a pro right there, it does have a better glass quality as well, which if you are a glass snob and you're only using it inside of 400 yards, the extra 2x magnification is probably not as important as having just overall better glass quality. So, there are definite areas where the Steiner beefs out the Primary Arms Nova 100%, no questions asked, however, not by such a large margin to demand two and a half times the asking price. That's going to be the biggest downside of this optic.
However, prices change and hopefully after these stop selling, because I imagine the sales of these optics is going to come to a screaming halt at that seven to eight hundred dollar range. Hopefully, Steiner will again lower the price down to the four to five hundred dollar range, and now at that price range they make a little bit more sense. For a hundred dollar premium you get a little bit smaller lighter package with much better glass, you do sacrifice a little bit of top end magnification, 4 versus 6 when going to the Nova, but in a lot of situations glass quality is going to matter more than just having a little bit of extra magnification.
So, at its current price category this is a really hard optic to recommend even though it is quite good at what it does. For instance, you could get the Primary Arms Nova, a very good mount, an offset mount, and a Holosun dock for less than the Steiner P4XI and that's probably the route that a lot of people will go or just pocket the money because it's a 500 price tag difference, almost 500 between the two optics, and there's really only a little bit of separation in terms of their performance.
The last area that we need to talk about is going to be its durability and this might be another area where it does have an edge over the Primary Arms Nova. On this optic we did a five round control group using that 55 grain Callaway Ballistics at 50 yards, not a particularly good group, the ammo, some guns like it, some guns don't, but it is cheap remanufactured ammunition. Then we did a shoulder height drop onto dirt and gravel on top of the Steiner P4XI and we do another five round group.
The flyers in the group did shift, but overall, the groups kind of aligned over themselves perfectly, even though it was a very odd looking group to begin with, so whether there was maybe a little bit of point of impact shift, it was certainly not that much most of the issues were down to the ammunition and the barrel not really liking that cheap remanufactured ammo, but even in a worst case interpretation of the drop it was maybe one or 2 MOA of point of impact shift after a shoulder height drop directly on top of the optic. So, as far as durability goes that is actually quite a bit better than the Primary Arms Nova.
The P4XI is at a strange place in the market given its price to performance, however, I do want to say that the performance of the optic is very good, I know a lot of people that own these optics and love them because they are very good optics. It's just hard to go out and buy one and then justify that price unless you put just an extreme premium on glass quality, which some people do, or you just have a ton of extra money to spend and you would happily pay two and a half times the price for a little bit better glass quality or like 10 to 15% better glass quality. It is noticeable between the two optics, this and the Primary Arms Nova, but overall the Nova is just a better deal all day, every day. This is a fantastic optic, I wish they would drop the price, if they do drop the price back to four to five hundred dollars it's a lot more competitive in the market.
