Sig Romeo 5x Gen II - A Cabelas Exclusive Red Dot???
Updated
6 months ago
Good morning, everyone, this is John with gun.deals, today we're going to be taking a look at the very, very new Sig Romeo 5x Gen 2.
Full disclosure on the Sig Romeo 5x Gen 2 is that I paid full retail price for it, I bought it for $150, $160 from Cabelas, but there's not a lot online about the Sig Romeo 5x Gen 2, and in fact the only reason I know about it is because Hop sent me a picture of it asking if I had taken a look at it and within a couple minutes and a few clicks, well, I bought one for myself to see what it was all about. If you're not familiar with the Romeo 5 lineup you have the Romeo 5, which is actually sitting on a 193 riser right here, it's hiding from you but that one there is the basic model, you can find those for around 100 bucks on sale, it is the AimPoint T1/T2 style 20mm objective, very, very standard, very basic in the red dot game, but it has all the features that you want.
The old Romeo 5x similar to this has an integrated battery into the mount, but it has a separate piece on the bottom much like an AimPoint comp M5, I want to say, versus this gen 2 5x, which has a one piece aluminum body, which we'll get into in just a minute. The 5 XDR is the exact same thing but with a multi- retical options, so the 2 MOA dot and 65 MOA outer circle, and then you have the Romeo 7 Series, the 8 series, and the 4 series, all which have different features and do different things.
Getting into exactly what is the Sig Romeo 5x Gen 2, this is a one piece aluminum body, which I believe is 6061 T6, which is perfectly fine for these micro T1/T2 style of optics, even though this one here does not have any sort of mount compatibility because it is a one piece body.
In terms of size and weight it's very standard for the genre, a little bit over 4 inches long and the weight with the included mount and battery comes in at 6.1 ounces. A couple advantages of having the battery tray built into the body itself is that it doesn't have to be hanging off the side or the top because it's in the middle so it's not going to occlude any of your peripheral vision and gives you a slimmer, nicer looking package. One of the downsides of having a one piece body, battery tray, and all of that, is that you don't have any sort of adjustability with aftermarket mounts, riser plates or anything like that, and unfortunately the Romeo 5x Gen 2 only comes in at an absolute co-witness of 1.4, which is pretty low, most people prefer their optics a little bit higher to have a more natural head position, and this only comes in the lower position, so if you do want to raise it up you're going to need a riser like the unity riser or like the UTG 13 slot riser that I use on a lot of my guns.
The way they have redesigned the mount from the previous version, this is integrated, on the bottom we have two dedicated recoil lugs, as well as a squared off crossbolt that will act like a third recoil lug, and the crossbolt itself is quite substantial and ends in a half-inch hex, and a very large locking block, clamping surface, whatever you want to call it, to give you a very large amount of contact between the mount and your rail. On top of that, you can go all the way up to 65 inch/pounds on the half-inch hex, which is what I did. With a really good amount of surface area contact between the mount and the upper receiver, or whatever you happen to be mounting it to, in theory this is going to allow it to hold zero very, very well.
In terms of features of the 5x Gen 2 it has your standard feature set for a Romeo 5-ish red dot, you have 10 daylight settings, two night vision settings, this being the 5x means that it only comes in a 2 MOA red dot, which for me is perfectly fine. On top we have two rubberized buttons, one for minus one for plus that do plus and minus things. The turrets are exposed, however, they are protected and slightly recessed into the body of the optic. The clicks on this version are very, very tactile and audible, surprisingly they're some of the nicest most precise turrets I felt in a red dot, especially in this price range, even if it doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things.
This is a 20mm window, 2 MOA red dot as I mentioned, the refresh rate is very good, you get 10 daylight settings, which is more than you need, at setting 10 it is extremely bright, brighter than you'll ever need, unless you're staring at the sun or in some sort of snow, white out conditions, where you need that maximum power. Because this is a Sig red dot it also comes with their MOTAC, which is their motion activated illumination, meaning that after a couple minutes it will automatically turn off and then once it senses motion it will automatically turn back on. Battery life with that AAA battery is rated at 50,000 hours at a medium setting, though when you combine that with auto on/auto off you're going to be getting a battery life measured between 5 and 15 years or however long that battery can actually hold a charge.
The battery tray itself is o-ring sealed with the cap that you can get pretty tight on and the body itself is one piece and it does come with an IPX 7 certification. When it comes to actually using the 5x Gen 2 it is, fortunately, exactly what you would expect, the 2 MOA dot looks perfectly fine, it's crisp, it's concentric, it looks nice in a wide variety of lighting conditions, and there are enough brightness settings to get you where you want depending on how you want to use it.
The glass quality itself is perfectly fine, very good for daylight shooting, low light shooting, white light shooting, as far as passive aiming under night vision I can't really comment about it, although if it is the standard Romeo 5 series, glass quality, and lens coatings, and that sort of thing, then you're probably better off with a different optic, though for 150 bucks you're probably not looking for that sort of performance anyways.
Something that I've always liked about the Romeo red dots versus the Holosun red dots is that the Romeos have a much less obtrusive Notch filter, so most red dots will have some sort of Notch filter to provide contrast to save some battery and to provide clarity in different lighting conditions, there's a wide variety of uses for Notch filters, however, on the Romeo series they're much less obtrusive, so there's not very much color shift whatsoever, there is a tiny bit depending on your lighting conditions and how you're looking at it, but overall the glass quality looks good and if you're used to using red dots this is going to be nothing special, but it's going to be part for the course.
Getting into the drop testing that I did on this optic, I unfortunately have to apologize because the ammunition that I was using was a wide variety of ammunition thrown into a bucket so the group sizes were horrible, but it was anything from 55 grain Reman to 62 grain L2A1, so it was very difficult to tell what ammo was what, so I tried to get five of the same type, however, because it was all mixed, in the same container, the groups are going to look pretty bad. With a target set up at 50 yards I did a five-round control group, which looked very bad for the PWS Mark 116 that this was attached to, after that we did a shoulder height drop onto dirt and rocks, did another five-round group that looked bad, but fortunately was in the same general area, so no appreciable shift in zero.
Then I went ahead and did another drop onto an AR500 steel plate, this is an absurdly harsh impact and will kill most optics out there. The optic didn't die, these little 20mm red dots are incredibly durable just by design, especially with the good mount and integral body design, I don't see any problems from that aspect. However, after the second drop onto the AR500 steel plate we did have a point of impact shift of about 12 inches down and to the right. The optic is still fully functional and I was able to re-zero it and take it out to about 400 yards, however that point of impact shift I was a little bit surprised by.
The mount design on it is very good, you have a lot of contact between the upper receiver and the optic, it was torqued down to the recommended 65 inch/pounds, so I'm not sure if that point of impact shift was from the mount itself or from the internals of the optic actually shifting during the impact. There was a point of impact shift after one of the harshest drops possible and no point of impact shift, or no appreciable point of impact shift, after a shoulder height drop onto dirt rocks. As far as I'm concerned I'm relatively happy with that, though I would have been a static if for 150 bucks you could get a bomb proof design that would hold zero through just about anything.
At the end of the day the Sig Romeo 5x Gen 2, which as I'm reading now is a Bass Pro Shops/ Cabelas exclusive, is pretty good for the money, especially if you're looking for that integrated one piece mount however, the two downsides of the optic are the fact that it's not T1/T2 compatible, so for instance you can't put this on a low mount and use it on something like an AK or just something with a lower comb height and to get it higher you're going to need to use am aftermarket riser, which is going to have a little bit of tolerant stacking on whatever you're putting it on.
If you're looking for something at that absolute 141 height, you really like the integral design, it's only 150-160 bucks, which is on par with the Sig Romeo 5x Gen 1 non-exclusive model, but in that $150 plus price range I think it performs as it should, it's definitely nothing special for this price category, there's a lot of good options in the $100 to $200 price range for a budget red dot and that's a good thing at this point, this is just another option and again if you really like that one piece mounting body, and the mounting design is good, it might be something worth looking at. That's really all I got on the Sig Romeo 5x Gen 2.
