Simmons 44 Mag 6-24x44mm Mil-Dot Rifle Scope - Ready for 1000 Yards?

Before we take it to the range, it's obvious that the Simmons 44 Mag 6-24x44mm Mil-Dot rifle scope has some issues. It has some surprisingly upscale features for its price point, too.

Our 1000-yard rifle is nearly complete. We selected the Savage Axis as our base rifle, swapped the barrel to 7mm-08 Remington, and added a Boyds Pro Varmint laminate stock. The next major piece of gear we need is a scope.

The budget on this entire rig is $500, so we can't get the sort of optic I would prefer, like the SWFA 20X with its Mil-Quad reticle. Instead, I ordered this Simmons .44Mag for $130. After a mail-in rebate, the price was a mere $100.

On the surface, it has the features I want. It has a Mil-Dot reticle in the second focal plane, it has a top-end magnification of 24X, and the target turrets adjust 1/8th MOA per click. Instead of an adjustable objective, you get side focus. That's a rich feature set for such an inexpensive scope, and it gets even better. In my tests, the turrets tracked reliably - all the way to 60 MOA. The glass resolution was higher than I expected.

Now for the downside. The glass may resolve details fairly well, but the overall image is hazy. The sweet spot in the glass gives way to mush well before the edges. Brightness is inconsistent. Every kind of common distortion is present to some degree - astigmatism, color distortion, and barrel distortion. The worst of these distortions is the tendency for the scope to radically lose its parallax correction when adjusting elevation and windage. Annoyingly, the turret caps do not come off, so there is no way to reset the markings for my rifle's zero.

We'll see how this scope performs in testing. Hopefully it will retain its zero under recoil.

- The Social Regressive