March Scope Light Transmission

[andrews1958]

I have tried to find what the light transmission is on March Scopes. There does not seem to be any technical data on what they have. I have 3 of their scopes and they are all incredibly clear.

 

[R.Morehouse]

I don't have the #'s you are looking for. I DO run a fixed 50 & 36-55 EPZ on SR-BR guns here in western Pa. and have had no issues seeing any targets out to the 300yds I usually shoot. I used the 36-55 on a LR gun for a few years at Williamsport and it worked well there also. I use March scopes & Kahles for the personal confidence that they are going to hold POA for me. There may be crisper glass out there but I think for paper target use it isn't on the top of my list.

Regards
Rick

 

[Turbulent Turtle]

I have tried to find what the light transmission is on March Scopes. There does not seem to be any technical data on what they have. I have 3 of their scopes and they are all incredibly clear.

They provide some numbers at the site in the news section about their detailed comparison chart.

In there, they talk about coatings and how that effects light transmission.

It is my understanding that March uses lenses with full multi-coating. This means their lenses have many coats to deal with a large portion of the visible spectrum. As we all know, lens coating is a layer of some material on the lens that reduces (virtually eliminates) the transmission loss due to the light in that wave length being reflected by the air/glass boundary. Without the coating, the loss is 4% per boundary, with the coating, the loss is 0.05% for that wavelength. The more coating you have the more wavelength for which you remedy the reflectivity. I do not know who many glass/air surfaces there are on specific March scopes, but they all have multiple coats.

If you don't have a coating that is designed for yellow, for example, it means that 4% of that wavelength in the light. So for each color range you will lose 4% of that color if there is no coating to address that color. This is why cheaper scopes (non-multicoated) will display a specific tint. This means there is no coating to remedy one or more specific color and you're losing that light in the lenses.

If you have multicoating going on, you can use the 99.5% figure for light transmission at each air-glass surface, so count the number of air-glass surfaces in the assembly and use that value as a exponent. So let's say there are 14 glass-air surfaces, the overall light transmission is (0.995^14)*100= 93.2%

I hope I explained this properly.

 

[Sniper338]

I have a March highmaster. For what its worth, at least with the dot reticle, its is not good at all in low light. I happened to hunt with the scope once... had my second biggest deer out there first thing in the morning before daylight. Had to wait a good while even after I could see the deer with my eyes before it was light enough to see the reticle. Luckily he stuck around an extra 30 minutes that I needed to get a shot.

I was 32 yo with 20/20 vision.

 

[andrews1958]

They provide some numbers at the site in the news section about their detailed comparison chart.

In there, they talk about coatings and how that effects light transmission.

It is my understanding that March uses lenses with full multi-coating. This means their lenses have many coats to deal with a large portion of the visible spectrum. As we all know, lens coating is a layer of some material on the lens that reduces (virtually eliminates) the transmission loss due to the light in that wave length being reflected by the air/glass boundary. Without the coating, the loss is 4% per boundary, with the coating, the loss is 0.05% for that wavelength. The more coating you have the more wavelength for which you remedy the reflectivity. I do not know who many glass/air surfaces there are on specific March scopes, but they all have multiple coats.

If you don't have a coating that is designed for yellow, for example, it means that 4% of that wavelength in the light. So for each color range you will lose 4% of that color if there is no coating to address that color. This is why cheaper scopes (non-multicoated) will display a specific tint. This means there is no coating to remedy one or more specific color and you're losing that light in the lenses.

If you have multicoating going on, you can use the 99.5% figure for light transmission at each air-glass surface, so count the number of air-glass surfaces in the assembly and use that value as a exponent. So let's say there are 14 glass-air surfaces, the overall light transmission is (0.995^14)*100= 93.2%

I hope I explained this properly.

Thanks for your time in explaining. This explains it well. Again thanks.

 

[Turbulent Turtle]

I have a March highmaster. For what its worth, at least with the dot reticle, its is not good at all in low light. I happened to hunt with the scope once... had my second biggest deer out there first thing in the morning before daylight. Had to wait a good while even after I could see the deer with my eyes before it was light enough to see the reticle. Luckily he stuck around an extra 30 minutes that I needed to get a shot.

I was 32 yo with 20/20 vision.

IIRC, the dot reticle is not illuminated. I have a March-X 10-60X56 High Master for F-class competition. It's the bestest scope out there for that. I would not use it to go deer hunting because its lowest magnification is way too much for that purpose. I would definitely use my March-FX 4.5-28X52 or my March 1.5-15X42 for hunting. They are much more suitable for that.