Understanding Red Dot Sights

red dot sights can be an amazing thing or they can be a really annoying thing it depends on if you've come with the right expectations for them you've got to have the right expectations and you have to know how to use them it also helps a little to know how they work red dot sights have a few weird things to them that kind of throw off a lot of new shooters the first time you look through a red dot more so if you're an experienced shooter and you use a red dot for the first time they tend to seem like you can't in any by any means be accurate with them when you look through them the dot appears to move all over the place anytime you move your head and it just can't stay on target honestly the opposite's pretty true they do tend to stay on target well some of them will have a little issue with a lot of parallax most of them don't a few of them do and i'll talk about that towards the end i'm jordy buck and this is michigan sharpshooters helping you become well regulated so together we can preserve our freedoms what's the weird thing about red dots well red that's what we call single focal plane sights not first focal plane that's dealing with scope there's a single focal plane there's only one focal plane that's because what you're focusing on isn't crosshairs which are a physical thing crosshairs are two pieces of wire crossing it's not anything like that it's literally just a light it's no different than shining a flashlight on something you can't really focus on a flashlight being shined across the room what you're focusing on is what you're shining the light on so with a red dot i'm not really focusing on the dot i'm going looking through the dot and i'm focusing on the target meanwhile i'm just putting that red dot on the target but my focus is on the target that's why they're so fast and why your target acquisition is amazing with them but how that works i'm going to show you with my diagrams here as i stand on this side so here we go my diagrams for red dots up here this is my red dot just a real basic cheap one this one down here is more your common pistol style red dot that a lot of guys are using so right in the bottom here is my diode light emitting diode your little led that's with the basic tubular design red dot these things are pretty simple the light comes out from the diode and it hits a lens this lens is slightly curved and it's set on an angle this is actually a mirror lens too believe it or not it's a mirror lens if you look at it from both directions it's technically a mirror however it's filtered so that only red light doesn't pass through it so the red light will reflect back but all the other colors go through it's really weird anyway the light comes through hits your little mirror lens and it comes right back out to you so you can see that red dot so all you're seeing is the reflection of the red dot on that little mirror lens that's why there's not really anything legitimate to focus on still though your eyes pick it up so well and so sharp so instinctively and intuitively it's simple and basically foolproof the same thing pretty much with the with these kind of boot shaped red dot sights the more pistol style you get a little led diode puts the light out to a lens which bounces it up to a curved lens which brings it to this lens which puts it out to the main lens where you see what you're looking at is a reflection that's all you're looking at is remove that table profits my whole problem here what you're looking at is the reflection now that's why it's a single focal plane you're only looking at a 2d image there is no 3d to it so it's a whole different type of focus and it's much quicker to to look at that and get your target picture of that red dot put on your target and when you use a red dot you don't focus on the dot you focus on your target and you just let yourself put the red dot on the target that you're focusing on that's why a lot of tactical trainers and tactical teams prefer red dots now it's because you're focusing on your target instead of your sights so you you're focusing more on the potential threat now the the weird thing with red dots is how the dot tends to move all around inside the reticle i've got my little dot here i've got my reticle drawn you start with the dot right in the middle if you move your head to the left you'll see the dot move over to the left of the lens if you move your head to the right you'll see the dot move over to the right of the lens in fact that dot can move anywhere inside of that lens and that's not a bad thing once you've sighted in your red dot initially as long as that dot is on your target it doesn't matter where in the lens it is as long as it's on your target it's going to hit the spot that you're aiming for and if you put the dot right on your target and then move your head to the left you'll see that although it looks like the dot moved that that's still on target now that brings me to my final point here which is parallax parallax is a weird thing that throws a lot of people off parallax isn't is when you're looking through your scope or looking down through your red dot you move your head a little bit and you actually see your aiming point the dot of the crosshairs you actually see that move away from your target so although the gun is still pointed in the same spot it looks like it isn't that means that if your head wasn't perfectly centered in there and you aim with the cross there's a red dot right on target anyways you're going to be shooting off one way or another some sites and some red dots have it kind of an extreme level of this and some of them don't a lot of them don't some of them are as bad as 13 minutes of angle off or about seven six and a half to seven inches at 50 yards some of them are only about one to two inches off at 50 yards and that is well within the means of acceptability i had to take a little couple notes on this part gotta remember these points i've i found some pretty neat studies on on the parallax of red dots there's really only one comprehensive study done on it and it was really done well basically the best that they had about a hundred different people try out these different red dots and measure the parallax on them the better performing ones were the aimpoint t2 any of the eotax all the eotech sites really were higher performing than even some of the more expensive versions there was the beerus fast fire 3 and the best of all was the eotech exp 3.2 that was the consistently best performing with the least amount of parallax from multiple shooters and even just from one shooter to another the perceived parallax will change because it has a little to do with your eyesight as well but those ones the aimpoint t2 most aim points are doing fairly well but the aimpoint t2 was one of the top performers anything eotech eotechs are great and i really didn't want to like them but i'm liking them more and more as i'm working with them and seeing them prove successful every time and time again so red dot sights i mean i've got my little red dots i bought this thing cheapest one there was an old true glow almost 20 years ago now yeah more than 15 going on 20 years ago this thing it's the cheapest one you can get it's nothing fancy it kind of works but i i wouldn't expect to have anything beyond about a 10 inch ring accuracy at 100 yards with this really it just doesn't shoot much better a better red dot especially something like the eotech's some of the aim points they're going to shoot much better generally red dots are for use of 100 yards and under even the better ones once you get up to about 100 yards the fact that there's no zoom on them generally most of them don't have a zoom the dot is usually between three and five minutes of angle wide which is a huge aim point at 100 yards when you're aiming with almost six inches at 100 yards that's on a torso you're talking an end point about that big you get much further than 100 yards and you're not even going to function well on the larger torso size targets but for 100 yards and under they're amazing i know some of the more modern red sights some of the stuff made by sig in particular they're really getting incredible with the fine points the really fine even reticle style red dots but the really fine dots and the magnification that they have they're really getting better but they're also pretty pricey right now so i'm kind of holding back temporarily maybe this spring i'll come out of my cave here and see what i can do well that's what i have for you guys today with michigan sharpshooters i hope you learned a little something about red dots and encouraged you to look into them for yourself if you like this video i'd appreciate if you click the like button because that'll help us get these out to you more thanks bye now

Channel: Gun Tradition

Views: 49,702

Keywords:

Id: iaZVgF7lUmM

Length: 10min 11sec (611 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 28 2021