Thread: SFP or FFP

About 5 years ago I was at a friend's place when he showed me his Vortex FFP scope. I was intrigued and for the next few years have been looking at FFP scopes and always considered to buy one if the opportunity presents itself. About a year ago the moderator of this forum had a new but opened Vortex FFP up for sell at a very good price of 900. I seriously considered it but in the end decided to give it a miss. Here is my thought process which I thought I would share. Take whatever you may consider useful from it.

1. My understanding is that the point of FFP is that you can use the reticle to range at any magnification. With SFP, you can still use reticle to range, except it will only work consistently at one particular magnification. for example a 4-16 x 50 SFP with markings on its reticles may be designed to range only at 16 magnification and does not work at 10 magnification. So all that FFP saves you is the need to turn the magnification to 16 to range (and maybe turn it back to 10 to shoot, if you so inclined).

2. FFP is probably not useful for target shooting, unless in some specific discipline where real life sniping is mimicked. in most target shooting disciplines you want more magnification and better clarity over ranging functions. you would either already know the distance or free to use a range finder to measure the distance correctly.

3. FFP is probably not useful for hunting either. The idea of FFP is to use a object of known size to work out distance. That object is usually a enemy male soldier, with average height of 175 cm. Male soldier with height 5% outside this average is uncommon (shorter than 166 cm and taller than 183 cm), and 10% outside is very rare ( shorter than 157 cm and taller than 193 cm). So your ranging will be 90% within 5% margin of error and 99.5% within 10% margin of error. However, For hunting, you can easily come across animals of sizes varying 50% or more. Most people cannot tell, through a scope, whether they are looking at a young animal or mature animal, therefore will not be able to estimate the size of the animal they are looking at. I am a novice when it comes to hunting anything bigger than a goat but I have shot thousands of possums. I still cannot tell if I am looking at a young possum or a mature one unless I have killed it and looking at it up close.

4. There is probably no need to range that quickly in hunting anyway. When you hunt, you are not dealing with an enemy who is also actively looking to shoot you back. Therefore if the shot is far enough that you need to range it, you will probably be unseen anyway. You will almost always have enough time to at least turn the magnification of your SFP scope to the range-accurate magnification and range the target (assuming you know the target's size). Better yet, pull out the range finder and do it properly. In other words, the risk of losing the shot by not using FFP in hunting is very low.

If FFP scopes are the same price as SFP and are just as available, I would probably buy FFP, because the cool factor. But as things stand now, FFP are more expensive for the same model and your choices are quite limited. So for me, unless a bargain comes across, I would not buy one.