…Does anybody here on the Forum have any firsthand experience with this brand?…good, bad, or indifferent?…I’ve read reviews that put the brand in a good light…but I trust the Sigforum members to be a good source of knowledge over random reviews on the interweb…the reason for this post is that BERELI has one on sale that interests me…$165 with their free shipping…it’s a 30 millimeter tube and I have a 30 millimeter AERO base just laying around collecting dust, so that base is covered…

https://www.bereli.com/3p416as23/

There is also a $50 rebate in the mix…putting the price even lower to $115+tax…shipped to my door…

https://www.bereli.com/optics-rebate/

BERELI has always been an upfront company with which to do business…I’m in the search for an inexpensive, but quality (within reason) scope for a newly built AR upper…and being a “thrifty” old man (some would argue ‘cheap’)…this is an inviting purchase option that I am considering…

So what say y’all my fellow SigForum members…buy or pass?

No experience with the scope that I’d never even heard of before, but I did what you probably did which was to look for online reviews and came up with nothing other than videos by the manufacturer.

But as an opportunity to inflict some general comments about inexpensive scopes:

It seems to be generally agreed that what increases the costs of scopes these days is image (glass) and mechanical quality. The latter refers primarily to tracking accuracy and consistency, but also magnification range and ruggedness to some degree. But what also count are manufacturing origin, the sizes of lenses, and probably most important—brand name.

How important are any of those?

The first riflescope I bought in about 1973 was a Lyman “All American” fixed 6-power “Perma-Center” model. It has a 1 inch maintube and the objective lens measures about 36mm. The parallax is fixed, probably at 100 or 150 yards, and the reticle is a simple fine crosshair with no “duplex” or calibration markings. The eyebox is pretty tight. The Perma-Center feature means that the crosshairs remain centered in the field of view when adjusting for windage and elevation—something that was not true of all scopes of that era, and especially earlier.
I mounted the scope on a Ruger model 77 rifle chambered for 270 Winchester.

I still have the scope, and in daylight I don’t see any notable optical difference between it and a top tier scope that retails for well over $6000 today. That’s probably due in part to its being a fixed-power scope with a minimum number of internal lenses and its modest objective lens diameter. But would it be suitable for serious long range precision rifle competitions? No.

First is its limited magnification. Even though 6× was considered to be unusually powerful for hunting purposes when I bought it, when I wanted to be able to reliably hit a 4-inch circle at 200 yards in drills today, I found my first pick, a maximum of 15×, was a little low, and I prefer 20-25× for the purpose. A max of 6× wouldn’t be sufficient to see most precision rifle competition targets these days.

The Lyman scope is also a “set and forget” the zero model. The windage and elevation adjustments are under capped turrets with rubber gaskets for water resistance, and don’t have clicks for precise settings: use a dime to change the settings using rough moveable scales, and when the scope is zeroed, it’s left that way unless something like the ammunition changes. There’s no adjusting on the fly, and certainly no guarantee that we can dial it up some amount and then be able to dial back down to the zero setting. If it was necessary to engage a target at a distance other than the zero distance, for example a steel target at 500 meters, the shooter just adjusted the point of aim, not the scope.

Despite all that, I used the scope and rifle to kill the largest game animal I ever shot, a javelina, and used the combination to win my class in the first metallic silhouette competition I shot about the same time. A friend used the same rifle to shoot the smallest group of the day in a related competition.

A highly-qualified optics reviewer, including of today’s top tier riflescopes, observed that the most important feature of a scope is being able to see the target. Things like absolute clarity and lack of chromatic aberration or image distortion at the edges of the view are nice, but hardly critical. For someone who doesn’t constantly adjust elevation settings, their accuracy and consistency don’t matter either; I have no idea how my ancient Lyman would measure up in the last regard, but it was something that made no difference at the time. A calibrated reticle in the scope would have been useful, but was unknown in most scopes then.

None of that is to suggest that scope features don’t matter at all, only that their importance depends on what the scope will be used for. If I had no alternatives, my old Lyman would be perfectly suitable for many purposes today.