I have always been of the opinion that the so-called "widefields" and such were pretty much snake oil. the ones I have looked at appeared to simply have a bit of the top and bottom cut off as opposed to actualy having a wider field of vision. Am I wrong?

No, you are not wrong. If the ocular lens were the same height as it is width then the sight picture would be round and net larger.

Redfield gambled on the "Widefield" TV-view scope to try to recover market shares lost to Leupold as Leupold became recognized as making a better scope. Most hunters saw the Widefield as a gimmick and Redfield's sales fell to a fatal level even as the crew who formed Burris jumped ship. Weaver made a similar Hail Mary marketing effort with its own squashed-view series of K-derived scopes, which was also too little too late. Too bad. Both Denver Redfields and El Paso Weavers were good, serviceable instruments which are still useful optical gunsights when you can find them -- with a normally round eyepiece, that is.

Leupold is too well entrenched in the market to let a single mistake devastate them, but their scopes with a divot cut out of the front bell put some hurt on them. The real bottom line is known only to a limited number of Leupold executives and bean counters, but I'll wager that they lost millions on the development and marketing of a sure loser.

Thanks for the reply Stonecreek. Thats what I thought but I wasnt aware of the particular history. Nothing wrong with a low profile scope, but you are right, thats not the way to do it.

Apart from the distorted pic, the whole idea of wide-view scopes was dumb. Fleeing game is no more likely to cross in front than to run straight away or quarter.

sambarman: There is nothing "distorted" about the wideview scopes' sight picture, just that the top and bottom of the otherwise round picture is cut off. It's not like a 4:3 TV picture stretched to 16:9 where even the skinny women look fat and a Smart Car looks as long as a limousine.

quote:

Originally posted by Stonecreek:
sambarman: There is nothing "distorted" about the wideview scopes' sight picture, just that the top and bottom of the otherwise round picture is cut off. It's not like a 4:3 TV picture stretched to 16:9 where even the skinny women look fat and a Smart Car looks as long as a limousine.

No, distorted was the wrong word. I didn't think they had done that morphing thing, but assumed something was fiddled to make it happen, say, sacrificing eye relief, to get the big picture. Ocular lenses can be made extra big to keep field of view while increasing eye relief, such as in the newer Kahles scopes, but whether or not you cut off the top and bottom, some compromise may be required in mounting. The Kahles 1.1-4x24 has no objective bell but may still have to be mounted higher so the ocular housing can clear bolt handles. I suppose wide-view scopes avoided that problem but most I saw had 40mm front ends and low mounting would not have been applicable anyway. So they might as well have given us the full circle, or at least the top half so we could see more critter when it was running away up hill.

+1, couldn't agree more.

IMO, the widefield gimmick is as useless as the "50-mm light gathering" objective.

quote:

Originally posted by dustoffer:
IMO, the widefield gimmick is as useless as the "50-mm light gathering" objective.

No, I think the widefield gimmick was less useful -- to the scope makers at least -- in that it failed to sell many scopes. The 50mm "light gathering objective" has sold a lot of scopes, mostly to people of the same level of maturity who buy 14" wide tires thinking that will help them drive through mud.