Very good ...hold (0) very good too...good for the money

Received this today. Took it outside to see how the glass was before I mounted it.
Lets say clear as crystal is an understatement. Alot of optics get blurry when you go to high magnification at close range. Not this thing - 12X and at not even 50 yards I was seeing the individual specs of rust on the support pipes of my close targets. Angled up a bit and went to 300 yards and was still picture perfect and as clear as day.

I will post a followup to this once I get it mounted and test to see if it holds zero but the construction feels damn solid and with the glass being this clear and a decent eye relief I expect this thing to perform solidly.

This is going on a .308

Many times I have been told “you get what you pay for” and in shooting sports “Cheap” and “Accurate” can't be used in the same sentence. So being the hard-headed old codger that I am, I set out to see if it was possible to buy a Budget (read that CHEAP!) rifle scope that was also accurate. My research led me to a scope that fit my definition of both “Cheap and Accurate”, the Athlon NEOS 4-12x40 available on Amazon for just a bit over $100 (as usual, Amazon's super fast Prime shipping was free!).

First impressions can set the stage for life-long opinions and my first impression of the Athlon NEOS scope was very good indeed. Packaging was an excellent full color hard cardboard “display” box held closed by rare earth magnets. The scope was wrapped in protective plastic with desiccant packs, cushioned at each end with tightly fitted high density urethane foam blocks, and included a set of plastic lens covers (bra style), cleaning cloth, and an owners manual. Fit and finish on the scope was very good to excellent. The turret caps were well threaded and sealed with “O” rings, the adjustable side parallax, diopter adjustment ring, power ring, and windage and elevation turrets were all smooth, positive operating, and exhibited no slack or roughness.

As with any mechanical device, looks can be deceiving and the only real question is … Will it do what I bought it to do? To answer that question I ran it through a series of tests and evaluations. First I centered the scope using a mirror test and found it pretty much centered from the factory. Next I locked it down on my leveling plate (think Surveyor's Transit with scope rail attached) and centered it up on a 3' x 2' MOA test chart at 50 yards. With it on the test bed I ran the magnification up and down the scale to check for zero drift, there was no visible drift. I ran the parallax adjustment from 10 yards to infinity then, without looking at the knob, used it to focus on the target, the reading was 50 yards. I then performed a 20 MOA “Box Test” using the elevation and windage knobs in all four quadrants, the scope returned to zero each time. The last test was to move the target out to 100 yards to check actual point of aim (POA) change vs clicks on the dials. In this test, the actual POA differed from indicated by approximately ¼ MOA per 10 MOA change in both windage and elevation, well within my accuracy requirements. The scope passed all of my static tests with flying colors, now for some range time!

For this test I mounted and moved the scope between three of my most accurate hunting rifles and fired 3 three shot groups at 50, 100, and 200 yards with each rifle. The rifles, a Browning Medallion in .308 WIN, a Browning Hell's Canyon Speed in 6.5 Creedmoor and, a custom built AR-15 in .223 REM are all consistently sub MOA. In every case the scope & rifle combination performed flawlessly with no increase in the rifle's usual group size (¾ MOA for the .308 and .223 and ½ MOA for the 6.5). During the shooting tests I could see no difference in light transmission between the Athlon scope and the Nikon Monarch's I run on the rifles. The only flaw that I observed was at high magnification on the 200 yard target where there was a slight aberration in the outer 2 – 5% of the glass. While this might become problematic at long distance (over 600 yards), I found it quite acceptable in a hunting scope.

In conclusion, this is an excellent scope for the budget minded hunter. Will it stand the test of time? We won't know the answer to that question until we've run it for for a few more years. My last thought on this scope is this ... while it will never match the quality of a high end scope, I figure that if it is even 50% as good at less than 10% of the cost … it is a winner! Now I just have to fire another 1,000 rounds to see if it will last!