When I first started Airgun Hunting, way way back in the late 70s, if you told a fellow Airgunner that your scope (should you have one for they were a rare item back then) cost more than your Rifle, they would have probably phoned for the men in white coats with those very special Target shooting coats that do up from the back.

Back then most scopes were horrible affairs with poor optics and tinny build, many crosshairs became T-hairs or just one hair as the wire broke and the mounts, frequently pressed metal uni mounts moved down the rail faster than trains did. ...Ahhhh good old British rail.

Things have certainly moved on since then and many many Airgunners have Scopes on top of their Rifles worth more than their guns; Nightforce, Schmidt and Bender and Kahles scopes costing well over a grand are now a fairly common sight.

I've long been a fan of European glass - be it Scopes or Binoculars - and had used a Leica and Swarovski scope on both my Steyr hunting 5 auto and several other PCP's I owned, and whilst been a big fan of the optical quality they were not without problems as Airgun scopes. Parallax was the killer with these scopes been intended for Centre Fire use.

I first came across IOR as a brand when a friend of mine, who is into Long-Range Full Bore shooting, started raving about his latest optic. It sounded like a Swarovski Spotting Scope clad in armour from his ravings. I was intrigued and began to trawl the internet for more info and eventually settled on an IOR RECON.

When it arrived I was, to put it mildly, a bit gutted, the box looked like it was going to contain the cheapest of Chinese knock offs (...never has a box so cheap and crappy hid such a treasure within... talk about not judging a book by its cover.)

The Recon is simply awesome! On first impressions, it's BIG, really BIG but after closer inspection, it's not actually much bigger than my Nightforce. It looks like how you would imagine a former Eastern bloc product might be; big, tough, rugged and bulky but within that tank-like exterior is a fine optical set-up that wouldn't be out of place at the Hadron collider so exquisite is its performance.

It's not until you look through a really excellent set of optics that you realise how good they can be, and I don't mean a quick look at the car over the road from inside a gunshop! That is not an assessment of the quality of a scope. It's only when at dusk as the last bit of light fades and you're looking for that grey rabbit sat in the dark hedge bottom that you realise how good the Recon is. The transmission is excellent, over 90 percent, but it's the definition and contrast that is so good.

This beauty parallax down to 7 yards at full 28× mag and is crystal clear. The eye box is forgiving and everything about it screams quality. Yes, its big (40mm tube size) but you will never run out of adjustment and one of my rifles is a sub 12 foot-pounds .25 cal so I need lots adjustment. The turrets are chunky affairs but not overly high like some and have a very positive click. It has zero stop and is first focal plane with a lovely reticle.

I like just a centre dot illumination. Some cheaper scope light-up like a Xmas tree and that's off-putting. My Leica and Swarovski had both very fine centre dot illumination's, and, thankfully so does the IOR, just as I like it - it makes fast target acquisition so much easier.

So to summarise, it's built like a tank, optically superb, has the best parallax adjustment I've ever seen, fantastic 4 to 28 times mag range and endless adjustment.

Just don't forget to buy some quality mounts for your new scope and it will outlive both you and me, and probably our descendants too.

[WORDS: Paul Ford, Fieldsport Cymru]

SHOP IOR RECON AT OPTICS WAREHOUSE - CLICK HERE!