See more results
for Primary Arms SLX Prism on Wikiarms.com
Primary Arms 3x32 Gen III SLX 3 "Macro" Prism - ACSS-5.56-CQB-M2
Updated
19 months ago
Good morning everyone, hope you’re all having a wonderful day today. Today we’re taking a look at the old the bold Primary Arms 3x prism of the past, but before we get into the video, if you don’t know, gun.deals is a website that provides you with links to some of the best products and prices in the industry.
Whatever it is that you happen to be looking for can probably be found on their website or at least a link to it for the lowest possible price. So, go ahead and check them out, they don’t take your money, they don’t buy or sell anything, they only point you in the right direction. Once again, that is gun.deals.
Now, while you’re here, you might like, share and subscribe, as all that sort of stuff is free and does help us out quite a bit. On top of that, go ahead and comment literally anything down below.
Now, with all of that out of the way, full disclosure on the Primary Arms 3x Macro prism is that I paid my own money for this optic, though, again, I do have a Primary Arms, they did send me the GLX 2.5-10 behind me. I’m also a dealer for Primary Arms optics so I paid a reduced price for this optic, so while I did pay my own money for it there is a relationship there and I also paid a reduced price for it, so go ahead and keep that mind.
Wikiarms.com Search Engine Results
Want to see your products here? Click this
link.
Powered by Wikiarms.com
Now, getting into some of the basics of the Primary Arms SLX 3x Macro prism, this is basically the older design, the full size and then recently they came out with their 3x micro prism. Spoiler alert, the micro prism is better that this in almost every single way possible. So, as you can tell this is a fairly large 3x prism optic, it’s about 5 inches long, about 2.5 inches tall. In terms of the body itself we do, of course, have capped windage and elevation, they’re in, I believe half MOA increments, and they’re definitely a set and forget. Nicely knurled caps, the caps themselves are captured with these little rubber grommets, all of that is well and good.
On the top of the optic we also have our illumination dial, which goes from 0 to 11, which is always nice, of course. It also houses our 32032 battery.
Now, in terms of battery I couldn’t find the specific battery life for the optic and I also don’t believe it comes with their auto-life technology, which is basically just their motion automated auto-on auto-off features on their newer style of optics, on their SLX 1x and their SLX 3x micro prisms. So, on this one here, if you’re not using it, I would either just keep it at zero or dial it back to zero when you’re done to preserve that battery life.
Now, on top of the optic, on the front side, we have three sections of Picatinny rail for attaching any sort of, you know, micro red dot style of optics whether that’s a Holosun an RMR or in my case a SIG Romeo 5. It is a little big, it looks a little funny on top of the optic, but, again, it is a nice feature to have right out of the box, you can throw on a red dot on top and give yourself some enhanced performance or close range performance in general, adds a little bit of versatility to the optic. Now, as far as the rest of the optic body goes, as you can probably tell, this is not a small optic, this is definitely a full-size prism optic.
Wikiarms.com Search Engine Results
Want to see your products here? Click this
link.
See more results
for Holosun RMR on Wikiarms.com
Powered by Wikiarms.com
Wikiarms.com Search Engine Results
Want to see your products here? Click this
link.
See more results
for SIG Romeo5 on Wikiarms.com
Powered by Wikiarms.com
Now, this one does come with an AR riser plate, I believe it goes up to 153 or 143, one of those, so it is very, you know, standard-ish absolute height, if you will, and if you don’t want it, if you don’t want to use the included AR riser you can, of course, drop that down to 1.1 inch height I believe, which would be more compatible with like AK’s or something that already has a higher comb height so you don’t need to have like a crazy chin weld or something like that. So, it does have some versatility in terms of its mounts.
Now, getting into the mount itself, if you’ve seen a lot of SLX mounts it’s gonna look very similar, you have two very substantial crossbolts that thread into two steel nuts on the other side, you have a very large clamping surface. On top of that, you have, I believe two integrated recoil lugs on the bottom of the mount, so as far as the mount design goes you get a lot of clamping force over a large surface area on top of a lot of contact with the additional recoil lugs that are also provide a hard stop to give you better zero-holding ability. So, overall, the mount design itself, the way it attaches to your upper receiver is quite good.
Now, with all of that additional size and material it comes in at a whopping 18.4 ounces for just the optic by itself, not including if you throw a red dot on top, of course, and that is actually going to be heavier than some LPVO and mount combinations.
Now, most LPVO’s and mounts will start at around 21 up to like 32 ounces on the heavy end, but, again, this is a 3x prism and it’s coming in at the same size and weight or at least getting up close to the same size and weight as some LPVO’s, which will be, by virtue of being LPVO’s, a little bit more versatile in their usability.
Now, getting into eye relief and eye box, this is one of the areas on the optic that actually performs quite well, so they rated it at 2.7 to 2.9 inches, that’s pretty accurate, you can back off a little bit, but it starts to close up very quickly as you get off of it, and now the eye box itself, the up, down, left and right, it’s not bad and it’s actually very forgiving. So, again, for a 3x prism, the eye relief and eye box is not bad.
Now, what is bad on the optic is you get a very diminutive field of view of 31 feet. Now, 31 feet is translator to 93 feet or so on 1x LPVO or on 1x setting on an LPVO, if you don’t know, anything below 100 feet, and my rating is kind of bad, anything above 100 is good, 110 excellent, 120 is like top-tier phenomenal, and this is all the way down there at about 93, again, in comparison to LPVO’s.
Now, field of view on a fixed magnification optic is actually more important to me than it is on an LPVO because, of course, on an LPVO you can always just dial back to 1x, both eyes open, fast acquisition shooting, you’re not gonna have that much of an issue.
With a 3x prism, that diminutive 31 feet field of view means you see very little all of the time, so for a lot of shooting that I was doing you’ll notice that I did have a Romeo 5 on top because it was much more usable up close with that. With a very small field of view, in about 15 and 50 yards, you need to be very precise with how you pull up onto target, so for instance, with this optic, if you pull onto target, and you’re just slightly off, you kind of have to then search for it as opposed to just adjusting to it within the glass, whereas if you have a 3x prism, a more forgiving field of view, say something like the 3x micro prism, which has 38 feet field of view, which is substantially larger, it’s about 25% more an actual surface area that you can see at one time, or Trihawk which has a ridiculous 52 feet at 3x.
That is very easy to transition between targets, even in very close ranges. This is going to be, again, not awful, not unusable, but it’s going to be the most awful and the least usable in terms of close range performance with that very diminutive field of view.
Now, when we’re talking about super close CQB and when you’re using the bin and an aiming concept, again, it doesn’t really matter all that much because you’re using both of your eyes to put that reticle on target, but, again, when you’re outside of that ultra close CQB, inside of like 15 to 50 yards, that’s where that close range, very, very tight field of view really starts to matter and really affects your performance negatively on the 3x macro prism.
Now, when we get into the actual glass quality itself, it’s actually not bad, this is another area where the 3x macro prism does fairly well. It’s fairly crisp, it’s fairly bright, it definitely looks what I would consider to be good. When taking this out to extended distances, we were actually using this on a reticle 762 by 39 out to 400 yards, and the glass quality, the crispness, all of that, was just fine, again, what really holds it back is going to be the very shallow field of view, which just means you get less information and it’s harder to use at all of those distances just because, again, you can see lees through it, and, again, it is a fixed magnification optic.
Actually, getting some pretty good hits off of it, so I’m pretty happy with that. We will reload and shoot some more.
Now, the best part of this optic is actually the reticle, this is the ACSS 556 CQB-M2-long name reticle, and the reticle itself is, of course, as most ACSS reticles are, very good.
So, in the center of the reticle we do, of course, have our chevron, which works as a very refined point of aim as well as a little bit of BDC, so at the center, the tip of the chevron, that’s where we zero at 50 and 200, the botto of the chevron is where we aim for 300, then, of course, we have our stadia lines for 4, 5 and 600 yards.
Now, on the outside of our stadia lines we have our wind holds, 4, 5 and 10-mile an hour wind holds, again, when using 5.56, 7.63x39, any caliber like that, having wind holds are gonna be very important because, again, those calibers are affected by wind.
Now, we also have a lot of other ranging features within the reticle, so we have two dots on either side of the center chevron, those are for movers, so people running at 8.6 miles an hour at 100 yards, so that is your lead, I believe for 5.56, if you’re using a slower or faster cartridge, obviously those are going to change a little bit, and on the either side of the horseshoe section we also have both of our auto-ranging brackets, so we have height ranging from the bottom to the top, again, I believe it’s 3,4,5,6 and then we also have our width ranging as well. So, again, you can use either of those ranging brackets to figure out how far away your target is.
So, like most ACSS reticles, it’s very well thought out, it’s very feature-packed, it has just about everything you could want in it, especially it fits very well with a 3x magnification level, again, just the package that is in with this macro prism, just isn’t the best.
Now, if we take out the 3x micro prism in terms of its competitors, you have other optics that have a lot better performance, but the reticle isn’t quite as good, so while I am being fairly harsh on the 3x macro prism because, of course, the micro prism does basically everything that this does, but better and also smaller and lighter.
And now, when we get into price, this one here, I believe retails for around 290 and the 3x micro is like 320, so there’s only like 20 to 30 bucks in terms of difference and you get more performance and half size and weight in the 3x micro.
So, currently there’s almost no reason to actually buy one of these optics, doesn’t mean that it’s terrible by any means, doesn’t mean that if you own one of these that you can’t make it work. Now, it does come with the included rail up top, so while I don’t like its CQB performance or its, you know, in mid-range, close range 15 to 50, I think it does fall behind other offerings that have less restrictive field of view, and now you can always throw on a red dot on top, but, of course, when you do that you get more size, more weight, and one thing that I didn’t mention is that when you are using a red dot you’ll notice in some of the footage is that you’re basically almost entirely off the gun at that point.
Overall, although there are just a lot of other competitive options on the market that perform as well, if not much better, for around the same money, if not less in almost every single case, less size, less weight, less bulk on your gun with much larger field of views.
So, again, with all of that out of the way, guys, I hope you all enjoyed the video. Let me know what you guys think of this optic, if you own this optic, do you love it, do you hate it, do you kind of find the same problems that I have with it or do you think that the reticle and glass quality makes up for all of that, again, it’s gonna depend on how you use optic as well.
Now, with all of that out of the way, guys, once again thank you so much for watching, I hope you all enjoyed.
I will see you in the next one!
Peace off!
