For me there's plenty to learn in aigunning and scopes, so help me out — how would I recognize a "hunting scope" from a "long range scope"?
Thanks,
Matthias
Hey Matthias: you are correct that there is no clear definition and now and days most scopes try to do both but lean towards one way or the other.
Here is my take/opinion on it which isn't worth much:
Hunting scope: generally referred to scopes designed for hunting with Power Burners, airgun is too small of a market compare to PB. Features valued by hunters generally is speed, speed means faster to your eye, target acquisition and the shot. To achieve that most hunting scopes have fixed parallax. To shoot faster you also need simpler reticles and usually that means simple crosshair or at most BCD hashes. Most hunts are well under 100 yards or much closer if you are in the stand or blind. Most hunting rifles value simplicity and ruggedness so no adjustable cheek piece so a very forgiving eye box is needed for fast shouldering or to eye. Also very wide field of view and long/wide depth of field, this is for fast target acquisition. Keep in mind this will affect the accuracy but when your target is size of dinner plate at 30 yards a little parallax error is insignificant. When dinner and/or pride pops into view you need to take that shot fast!
Target scope: name of the game is precision, precision and precision so no need for big and forgiving eye box because you will have adjustable cheek piece and you want up most precision when it comes to eye alignment. You got all the time in the world because targets don't got legs and usually stays quite still and you know where they are at so you have all day to find it in the scope, adjust parallax, make sure parallax is correct by moving your eyes, check eye alignment again, control your breathing, adjust your grip, adjust your hold, adjust your shouldering, adjust your bipod, check your cant..........you get the idea! One can and will spend many many minutes before a single shot.
So at the end of the day you have 2 very different end goals: speed or precision. You can decide based on your use case what compromises you are willing to make on which feature to achieve your goal. It's a very complicated discussion but if you are clear on what you really want to do with your scope then it's fairly easy to pick and choose the features that matters to your use case. Examples are how far, how big/small are the targets, how fast you need to acquire the target, how fast you need to shoot, how big of an area you need to scan, do you have adjustable cheek piece, how quick you can shoulder your gun, hold over or click turrets ..... you basically need to look at every single feature and make a decision based on what you want to use it for. Any given scope can be quite good at one thing and horrible at another.
Hope I didn't add to the confusion and there really isn't a thing as airgun scopes, they don't exist except for maybe springer. We just happen to be shooting at smaller targets and relatively long distance (amount of hold over or turret clicks).