Video Transcript
If you are looking for the highest quality LPVO on the market, it's probably this one right here. Let's see what's in the box. When you purchase a Nightforce 1-8 ATACR, here's all of the stuff that you're going to get in the package. You're going to get the scope that is clamshelled and protected by all this nice stuff. There's going to be the sticker on top that Nightforce is known for. So one of their 17 scope specialists is going to have looked at the scope. They have a very rigorous QC process to ensure that the product is quality and meets their standards. You will also get a small little spud lens cleaner. I actually really like these. I can kind of throw them on my kit and just throw them into pouches. So definitely put this somewhere so you can keep your scope nice and clean. A Nightforce tool. Don't take this for granted. You're going to be utilizing this or I highly recommend you utilize this when you need to re-zero the optic, when you start to actually zero it and get it set up.
You're also going to get, this is a common mistake that a lot of people make and I have made myself. You have an envelope in here that says do not discard. Inside of this is going to be the screw on throw lever. If you lose this or throw it away, you're just going to be manipulating the scope with your hands to magnify from one to eight. But instead what you probably want to do is actually utilize this, screw it into the actual scope so that you can kind of grab that knob and utilize it. There's also, and this is super cool, they have a beauty ring. They have two beauty rings, one for the elevation turret and one for the windage. Essentially what this does is the Nightforce one to eight has cap turrets, which is awesome. If you're running this on a regular carbine and you're slaying it, you're running all around, you don't necessarily want your turrets getting affected and spinning around and then being off zero.
However, if you're someone who wants to dial onto certain types of targets or you want to be able to dial under your zero to achieve speed drop, which is something you can Google look more into; they include this little ring inside for both of your turrets that protect the threads. So then your actual turret is exposed. So on this particular rifle right here, this is a BCM with a proof barrel. So I've kind of like, accurately this a little bit more. I have the turret capped on my windage turret because I don't really dial wind, probably never will. But I do like to dial my elevation. So I have the beauty ring dropped right onto here. So at any time while I'm shooting, I can run up here, dial 1.6 or dial whatever I need to. But I can also dial under to achieve speed drop and effectively turn my reticle into a BDC so that if I'm shooting a target at 100 meters, I'm going to hold on the one. If it's a two, I hold on the two and so forth. Usually to about 500 meters is where it maxes out.
So that's what the beauty ring is for. Every scope includes two of them. If you want to run without your turrets or your caps, I should say, it's something that you can do. And I like that they include these little rings to protect the threads. You also get the manual, obviously good stuff. And a swag sticker pack for those of you that are into that sort of thing. And that is it for what is included. You also get on the scope, something that is very important is scope caps. So a lot of scopes out there, especially more budget ones don't necessarily come with nice scope caps. These can also articulate based on how you're magnifying the gun. So it's always out of the way. Same with the front that can spin actually this one. This one is just going to screw on. And then yes, you can kind of spin it, wherever you need to, so that it is out of the way, either on the right side or the left side. I will say one thing that I like to do when you are running all of this stuff back here and you're wearing a hat or you just don't like all this additional border. If you are shooting this scope a lot on One X, what I prefer to do is actually remove the entire assembly.
So this is a 13.9 URGI style build. By removing all of this, I just have a little bit more. I feel like I have more situational awareness. I just have less stuff around the actual scope while I'm shooting on 1x and I can see around the scope a little bit better. So I usually just yank the entire assembly off if I don't need my scope covered for some reason, and I just run around and shoot as is. So that's one thing to look into if while you're ADSing through the scope and looking through it, you're like, "Wow, there's just a lot of crap going on back here." Remove the whole thing and it's gonna just look a whole lot better. Now, one thing about the 1-8 that I really appreciate is when I first purchased one of these, which is this green one down here, the reticle was pretty fat. The lines were very huge. The center dot was quite large. I think it was like a two MRAD circle, it was quite large. Recently or a little while ago, they actually updated the reticle. They made it much more refined so that when you are dialing up 5-8x somewhere in there, you have very fine aiming points to engage at distance. Now, I still shoot with my older model that has big blob larger reticle, but the newer reticle does have a lot of advantages and I do prefer it more. So that was something that they updated, which I appreciate, and they did it pretty quickly. Now, I force this end of company to just make a thing and then just go, "Good enough. We're never gonna change it. We're never gonna update it." If there's a good enough update that comes up or something that they wanna change, they're going to work on changing it. And I love companies that do that.
So the new one to eight is even better than the older one. The older one's still great, I still shoot with it, but I really prefer the newer one. I just have a much finer reticle for more precision and on 1x, it's still super bright. On that note, the ATAKR 1-8 is one of the brightest 1-8 LPVOs on the market in the first focal plane range. With that said, every scope company likes to say they're daylight bright or they're as bright as a red dot. Some people even say that. This scope is close to as bright as a red dot, but as a first focal plane optic, there's just some juice they're not able to get to the center like on a second focal plane optic.
It is not as bright as a T2. It's not as bright as an EOTECH, but it is very bright. And some of that is just the, where it is illuminated in the reticle, the entire sort of bullseye ring around the center of the reticle does contribute to making a very large illuminated image on 1x. So it is a very impressive scope in regards to that on a full, bright sunny day. If I'm on 10, which is the highest illumination setting, I am going to see red. And it's also, the other nice thing is the eye relief. As far as the illumination goes, if I move my head slightly to the left and to the right and up and down on 1x, I'm not losing all of my illumination. You'll kind of see it flicker slightly, but you still have enough of it that you can shoot. Some scopes out there, you move your head to the side and all the illumination is gone, like some of the 1-10. This scope, however, though, on 1x while you are getting full illumination, you can move your head side to side a little bit and you're still seeing the entire illumination. Once you start to magnify, a little bit of a different story, but you can actually use the illumination to ensure that you are directly behind the optic and you're not off to the side causing parallax issues.
There's a battery that can be removed for the illumination. You are simply going to go to the 10 and then you're going to twist the cap and there's a small tray that houses a 2032. So standard optic battery, swap that out, throw in a new one. The battery life on these is not incredibly great, just like every other LPVO on the market. So you definitely want to remember to turn this thing off when you're not using it. Just like a lot of scopes out there, in between every illumination setting, there is a off area. So you can kind of leave the scope set up in the area and the range that you like to have it illuminated. Mine's typically between like 7 and 8, somewhere around there, and it's in the off position as much as possible.
They also have super dim settings for if you're shooting all the way to the other side. They have three or they have two kind of night vision modes. They are super dim. You can obviously use them with a clip on night vision device. I'm just going to say it, I think it's funny. People who think you're going to be shooting night vision passively with a scope have obviously never done that. It is not something that can really be done on 1X even. It is just not something that is going to happen and give you a clear image to be able to engage. The purpose for this illumination is shooting in really dark situations where maybe you're not illuminating or you're not under nods, or you're running a clip on in the front.
Now, just like other LPVOs on the market, the eye relief for this scope is around four-ish inches. So you want to get a mount of some sort that allows the optic to be pushed further forward. I have seen people buy these scopes and drop them into a standard scope mount and then have to bridge between the upper receiver and the rail in order to get proper eye relief. And that's something that you don't want to do. So I have three different scope mounts right here. Just as an example, I have a Reptilia, a Geissele, and then this Seekins bolt gun mount. And you'll see that the furthest forward lug, these are all different distances.
You want to get a scope mount that's going to push this optic pretty far forward because on all of these rifles, you'll see it. I'm running it all the way to the edge of the upper receiver and I'm still running my stock all the way back. And this is for my particularly long neck in order to get a proper eye relief to shoot this optic. This is like a normal LPVO. You definitely want to jack it far forward all the way into the upper receiver as much as possible. The standard Nightforce mount, like this one right here works really well, although I am still required to run my stock all the way to the rear. So if you want to collapse your stock a little bit, you probably want to go get something super cantilevered like this Geissele. This is the super extended mount or whatever. And you'll see that the scope is like pretty far forward from my charging handle, but that allows me to actually run my stock a little bit closer and still get good eye relief on the scope itself.
When it comes to re-zeroing the turret, it's going to be a very simple process. I'll actually do it with this gun. You're going to undo the cap. You're going to take your Nightforce tool, what I talked about earlier, find the big bit. You're going to loosen both of the screws on the top of the scope till it's loose. You're going to turn it back to zero and then re-tighten them and you'll be set at zero. Shoot a confirmation group, make sure you didn't change anything in the process and then repeat as necessary. The windage is going to be identical. Two hex screws on the top, loosen those, move it back to zero, tighten them down and you're good to go. You can then install the beauty ring. If you want to be able to dial or you can just throw your caps back upgrade for this particular scope, if you are someone who's constantly magnifying from one up to whatever magnification you want is the extended throw lever.
The standard throw lever for this, it is quite good. It's very useful. You can get away with that just fine, but Nightforce also has this extended throw lever. It's just a little bit longer, a little bit easier to grab, gives you a little bit more leverage. So if you are someone who is treating this optic as a true 1x and you're shooting 1x really fast and you want to quickly throw the gun to four and engage, I highly recommend getting the extended throw lever. It just makes things a little bit easier. However, on this gun, you'll see I have an offset red dot. So I generally have this optic at like 4x because I'm shooting with the dot on 1x because it is faster in my opinion than even the optic on one. And I'm using the scope as a magnified optic. I'm shooting it on 4x, I'm shooting it on 6, 7 and 8. I'm not so much running it on one because I have the offset dot right here. But the scope is very capable on 1x. So on this rifle, which is sort of my competition style precision gun, I'm perfectly happy shooting this on 1x and then throttling up to whatever I need based on what target I'm shooting.
One last thing that you definitely want to play with, especially on an LPVO and that is setting your diopter setting. This was something that initially when I got into LPVOs long time ago, I went, wow, all these scopes are super fuzzy. It's my eyesight or maybe they just suck. Well it's because I wasn't setting the diopter to my particular eye and my right eye is not as good as my left eye. So in the process of setting my diopter to this eye, I can actually make the image look pretty good. What you're going to do is you're going to take your two hands, you're going to grab the scope here at the end and you're going to grab this ring and you're going to push them apart from each other to loosen them. And now by twisting eyepiece of the scope, you are going to be adjusting your diopter. And what you want to do, I like to go to 1X for this because this is an LPVO like I am, you know, kind of treating this like an LPVO on most of these guns, shooting on 1X. I find something on the wall, usually a target or something nice and fine.
Brighter is definitely better and I just bring the gun up, get a sight picture and see how clear the image looks. I then make an adjustment while keeping it on 1x, bring the gun up, see how clear it is, make an adjustment. And I do this process until the image doesn't look a little bit distorted and magnified because that's what's happening here with the diopter. You can make the 1x look like 1.1, 1.2 or even like 0.8 potentially. And then once you have the image nice and clear on 1x, we're like, yeah, this looks pretty good, it's pretty solid. You are simply going to take the locking ring right here, move it back into the scope and then twist into each other and they will be tight and good to go. You can also witness mark them, which I highly recommend. And if you really don't want these to change as you're doing stuff with the gun, you could also tape over the entire assembly. That is something that I do on some of my guns and it works very well.
With all that said, the Nightforce ATAKR 1-8 is possibly the best LPVO on the market. It is also costly, it is not as inexpensive as some of the other optics on the market and there are a lot of reasons for that. The quality and what you are getting out of the scope is incredible. As I have started to shoot more long range and I've started to do more precision shooting, I have come to appreciate a scope like this a whole lot more. I've used this scope for a very long time, this green one right here and it wasn't up until recently that I went, wow, the scope is actually extremely legit for what it offers even at the price point just with all the things that it can do and the fact that it has a mill-based reticle, not necessarily a BDC. There are some things that I understand that I can do with the scope that allows me to just be more effective with it. So if you are, my recommendation is, if you are interested in purchasing the scope, go and do some research, go and do some study on what you can do with mills, learn what speed drop is, learn how you, you know, dialing on targets, learn all of that so you can get the most out of the scope and not just play the guessing game of, oh, that target's far away, I'm just gonna hold on this three and see if it hits. Actually go learn what this scope can do so that you can get the most out of it and it can truly be an effective piece of equipment for you.
If you have any other questions about the Nightforce ATAK-R 1-8 or any of the other Nightforce products, go ahead and email us at team@trex-arms.com.