Following is an email I received this morning from Randy Oates, owner of R.H.O. Instruments and a well-know classic Malcolm-style scope supplier. I had spoken to Randy about his scopes a few years ago and knew that his scopes do not feature a parallax adjustment, but asked him to comment once again. I thought some of you may be interested in his response below. ================= "Hello Wayne, Thank you for your interest in these sights. In answer to your question, these telescopes are not adjustable for parallax, however, due to the quite long focal lengths of the lenses used in these telescopes, parallax is not much of an issue. The telescopes are zeroed for parallax at 200 yards, and there will be essentially no parallax at distances further than this. At say, 100 yards a small amount of parallax may be observed, but this will amount to no more than approx 1/8" total movement of the crosshairs. At 50 yards observable parallax will be about 1/4". In practice, actual effective parallax will be even less since the relatively small exit pupil diameter of this type of telescope tends to keep the eye well centered in the image (field of view). If a person wants to use one of these telescopes at a very short distance all the time, say 25 or 50 yards, I can adjust the parallax to zero at this distance, but there will then be some parallax at longer distances." Regards, Randy Oates ============= One of Randy's interesting comments is ..."due to the quite long focal lengths of the lenses used in these telescopes, parallax is not much of an issue". Therefore, the implication, at least to me, is a shorter scope of equivalent power (hence with shorter focal length lenses) and no parallax adjustment could very well have an accuracy problem due to parallax. I also called Leatherwood and asked what the zero parallax range was in their scopes, especially the short 18" 6X version. They did not know. So I'm following up with an email hoping they will evenually respond with a better answer. I know some of you guys are thinking, "why doesn't this guy give it up and just buy an MVA"? The answer is I just can't justify spending $950 - $1000 for a scope at this time. Stay tuned, Wayne
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