caorach
Well-Known Member
As you might have noticed I'm a big fan of Nickel telescopic sights and think that they are probably the best in optical quality.
However, recently I've been thinking about a straight draw telescope to use for some long range spotting and I notice that Nickel 15 - 60 telescopes occasionally come up for sale on this forum for reasonable money and so thought to ask if they are actually any good? Assuming a decent rest can you see anything at all out of them or are you just as well off with a decent set of binos? Also what is the actual usable magnification out of them? I'd guess at 60X the image must be pretty dark in all but the best light.
The majority of my stalking is in forestry and so I'm not really intending to use the scope for stalking as such but I have a few areas where you can sit and watch the edge of the trees to maybe 1500 yards or more and I thought it might be fun on a quiet afternoon to lie up and see if there are any deer moving and binos just don't have the magnification to see deer over this sort of distance. Given this I can't justify more than the sort of money Nickel scopes make but I don't want to attempt to buy the next one to appear in the classifieds only to find that in the real world the image is so bad that my binos would do a better job.
However, recently I've been thinking about a straight draw telescope to use for some long range spotting and I notice that Nickel 15 - 60 telescopes occasionally come up for sale on this forum for reasonable money and so thought to ask if they are actually any good? Assuming a decent rest can you see anything at all out of them or are you just as well off with a decent set of binos? Also what is the actual usable magnification out of them? I'd guess at 60X the image must be pretty dark in all but the best light.
The majority of my stalking is in forestry and so I'm not really intending to use the scope for stalking as such but I have a few areas where you can sit and watch the edge of the trees to maybe 1500 yards or more and I thought it might be fun on a quiet afternoon to lie up and see if there are any deer moving and binos just don't have the magnification to see deer over this sort of distance. Given this I can't justify more than the sort of money Nickel scopes make but I don't want to attempt to buy the next one to appear in the classifieds only to find that in the real world the image is so bad that my binos would do a better job.