David:
This is a red dot. As far as the camera's concerned, it's beautiful. The projection of the.is perfectly round. The problem is the human eye isn't as perfect as a well-made camera lens. Astigmatism is when the curvature of the cornea of your eye and the lens inside your eye don't match, which makes focusing on little points of light very difficult. So that beautiful red dot will look like this or this or this. If you have uncorrected vision, but you see starbursts around taillights on cars on the road at night, then you probably have an astigmatism like 40 to 60% of the population. So what can you do if you have an astigmatism? How can you clean up how that dot looks and why does it look the way it looks? We'll answer all of that in this video.
David:
Welcome back to the Humble Marksman Channel. And before we get started, why should you not brush your teeth with your left hand because the toothbrush works better? That joke comes from us through T-Rex in the comments, if you've got a favorite dad joke, be sure and mention it in the comments may be featured here on the channel. I'm David and I've been shooting Red Dots exclusively for about the past, I don't know, five or six years. So today we're going to be looking at red dots. We're going to take, I got I think 14 of them out here at the range. We're going to go through 'em all and really we're talking about astigmatism, like which dots appear best to the uncorrected eye. You haven't seen me wear these glasses in a long time on the range. These are my prescription shooting glasses, so I don't have my contacts that I normally wear in and I have an astigmatism.
David:
So I'm going to look through all of these red dots, tell you which ones look the best, and I'm going to give you some tips where you can minimize the effect of the star bursting on your red dot. So let's check it out and get going. This video is sponsored by Optics Planet, where you can save 7% with code HUMM. They've got something cool going on that you might want to check out this week, but let's get into it. So I actually consulted with one of my Patreon supporters who is an ophthalmologist and an optometrist. So we're going to get super sciencey at the end of this thing after we show you what the dots look like. The first is the Trijicon RMR three and a quarter MOA. Now this is a dot that I carry, so forgive the shirt lint, but to my eye, what I observed with correction versus uncorrected astigmatism is the dot was about twice as big and a little bit star bursty.
David:
The Trijicon SRO has a different notch filter on the glass and it's a five MOA dot. So I observed that the dot was only about 30% larger than it was corrected, and it was much cleaner appearing to my eye. The Delta Point Pro I tried in both two and a half and six MOA. Now the Delta Point Pro in two and a half MOA looked roughly two to two and a half times as big, was very star bursty and not very clear to my eye. Whereas the Delta Point Pro in six OA was maybe only 30% larger and significantly cleaner. The hollow sun 4 0 7 C shares the same housing as the 5 0 7 C. It just has its loan to moa. But that two mo a to my eyes was at least two times as big and significantly distorted. It was not as bad as the Delta point Pro, but it was close. The hollow sun EPS is one of the enclosed emitter optics, and this one is in six MOA. And I have to say about this one, it absolutely floored me. There was zero distortion to my eye. It looked exactly the same corrected versus uncorrected. I was really happy with this one.
David:
The Hollow Sun 5 0 7 comp is a multi radical system and I looked at it with the two and eight MOA ring, which is what most people probably end up using. But what I was really surprised to see is that the outer ring had zero distortion, but the inner ring when uncorrected was roughly two times as big, making it appear as a solid dot. The Steiner NPS and 3.3, yes, 3.3 MOA looks absolutely amazing. It is just as good as the hollow sun EPS as far as the dot clarity both corrected and non corrected. It is on one of my main carry guns and it just looks fantastic. This next one is for sure, going to flip some of you guys out. It is a 10 MOA Seymour RTS two B, and this dot looks absolutely pristine to my, I both corrected and non corrected. I could run this dot with a lot less brightness and I think that is part of the reason why it looks so good to my eye. Some of you will have not heard of this next one, it is the Sili Cat Pro in 3M OA. They say it's got windowless LED technology yet is still fully submersible, but what I observed is this was another reflex site with one of the crispest looking dots of any of them both corrected and non corrected. I was surprised how good this dot looked.
David:
The sig Sour Romeo one Pro has really good looking glass and a pretty good looking dot. the.to my eye when it was uncorrected was roughly two times as big and looked something more like this. The Romeo two is a slightly different lens in emitter combination, and what I noticed is that the dot, and this is a six MOA only looked about 50% larger, so it actually looked pretty good uncorrected to my I The Romeo three max is in six MOA. It is one of the larger dots, kind of similar to the Seymour rts two. And not to my surprise, it came in pretty clean. It got a little bit fuzzy but stayed roughly true to size and was pretty clean. The Romeo M 17 is for basically this slide only, but it's got a two MOA circle with a 32 MOA ring, and the ring was super clean, but the dot would get roughly twice as big when I was uncorrected. So not bad, not great.
David:
And as a bonus, because you guys are probably going to ask in the comments and if you haven't done so already, maybe comment in your favorite dad joke. But the aim point acro P two, I don't have it currently mounted on a gun, so it didn't have it out on the range, but I did take a look at it. And this one, it's a three and a half MOA, but it does starburst the worst to my eye. I would put it like rank with the Delta point pro and the hollow sun two MOA on the 4 0 7. Those three Starburst did the worst of my uncorrected eye even corrected the aim point P two doesn't really resolve into a nice clear dot. It looks visibly smaller than a true 3M OA dot. Like the Trijicon threes look bigger than the aim point, and that might be part of the reason why it is not looking as good as it should.
David:
So that is a bit of a hodgepodge of data. What do we do with that? That's where I called in the big guns to try and make sense of it. And there are several factors at work as to why the dots look as good or as bad as they do. So there is a couple things that you need to be aware of. The first thing is people like to talk about green, whether green is a good choice. If you don't have an astigmatism, green may be a good choice because green is the color that we have the most receptors for in the eye. However, there is a thing called the spectral luminosity curve and basically light at different wavelengths, which means color. We're just going to say color spreads out inside the eye at different rates, and the color that spreads out the most is blue, and the color that spreads out the least is red.
David:
So red is actually the best color for someone with an astigmatism to have on a red dot. Second is going to be brightness. If we think back to what an astigmatism is, it means the curvature of the cornea of your eye. The outer edge of your eye is more shaped like a football kind of cut in the long plane than it is a basketball sort of cut in half. And as a result of that, you're not able to resolve images to necessarily a point, but you're able to resolve them to kind of align. And it's the difference between where that image resolves from the front plane of the eye and your internal lens. So that's why when you look at taillights at night, you see those great big lines. Why are some of the dots three, m, OA and some are six MOA or 10 MOA, that look the best?
David:
And so let's kind of dive into that. The first thing is brightness. The perception of brightness with how you are seeing the dot has a lot to do with how crisp the.is going to resolve. If you have a six MOA and you adjust it to where it's semi-transparent, but with a two or 3M OA, you just can't track the dot with that level of dimness. If you bloom the dot, you are increasing the light coming into your eye and you're increasing the starburst. A way that you can kind of replicate this on your own is take an unloaded and clear gun with you into the bathroom with a red dot on it, dial the dot all the way down and then start dialing it all the way up. And notice how the distortion of the dot gets brighter as you increase the intensity of the dot.
David:
So dots that rely less on brightness to be perceived like large dots are going to appear cleaner than dots that need a lot of brightness to be observed, which is generally small dots. A good illustration of that point is looking at the Delta Point Pro that has the same lens, the same glass coating, the two and a half MOA, which it needed to be brighter, had more distortion than the six moa, which I didn't have to turn up as much to keep track of. So it appeared cleaner, but that still doesn't get us there. That still doesn't help explain the why, how two of the dots were actually smaller dots at the 3M OA range. But what matters possibly more than that is the coating that actually goes on the lens. And what I noticed about all four of the dots that I would put in the best category is that the notch filter that they use has almost no distortion and really no blue distortion.
David:
It has a bit of green gray type notch filter, and you can observe that in the RMR. The RMR didn't look as good to me as the SRO did. The SRO has a gray green type notch filter where the RMR has more of a blue notch filter. The problem with blue, if we go back to kind of our spectro luminosity curve, is the glass is blue, which means the light coming through the lens is going to have more blue enhanced light hitting your eye, which disperses inside the eye. The ones that were coming through more of a green gray, were actually presenting dots a little bit clearer because all of the ones in the better category had very much a gray green tint. All of the sig dots are very gray green, but all of the best dots had a very, very slight notch filter as far as how it colored the light coming into the eye.
David:
So what can you do with that? Well, first and foremost is dialing the dot down. We talked about using a semi-transparent dot. So basically dial the dot up until you can't see through the dot anymore. Then dial it down one click or two and figure out what you can get away with. You don't need the dot necessarily to blind you to keep track of it, but you just want a dot that is just bright enough to be observed but not so bright that you want to focus on it. The next best thing you can do is to get some blue blocker style glasses. Now, I compete with hunter's HD gold glasses, which has a yellow lens which blocks the blue light coming in from the outside. And the net effect of this is that the light emitted from the red dot comes in as more perceptibly bright.
David:
So I can actually dial down my dot another step or two when I use the yellow lens glasses. And obviously another step you can take is to get corrective eyewear, get some prescription glasses that correct your astigmatism, and that's obviously going to help probably the most. And finally, if you actually are shopping for a dot, see if you can't borrow some of your buddies. Go to a store and actually look through them. Look through them in a variety of light settings. Look at it in the dim store pointing into a dim corner of the store. Then look at it pointing outside the window or something like that and see just how the dot looks. Obviously if you have a line on getting ahold of some used sites, that's a great way to sort of try on some different glass and red combinations. But finally, really, you don't need a totally round.to aim with. If the.is consistently misshapen in whatever shape that it is, then you can use that exactly like you would a dot. They've been selling optics with triangle or Chevron type les. You can make do with your crazy starbursting little shape. You can optimize it a bit through what we've discussed, but you can ultimately just make peace with it. So that is what I have for you guys. Please sound off in the comments with which dots look the cleanest to your eyes. As always, I appreciate you guys and I'll catch you on the next one.
YouTube Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dz8LPDm6Of0
Credit: The Humble Marksman