Has anyone tried the SAI 6?

[ComenGetem]

I've recently come across the SAI 6 which is from the same mfgs. as Elcan Optics. I'm really interested in the optic, as I have found that I thoroughly enjoy LPVO optics. However, this is not a common optic and I haven't had any luck finding a carrier so i can physically hold and look through the optic. I recently got rid of and Eotech Vudu 1-6 which I liked however had certain gripes about it. Personal preference type stuff mainly. So with that being said is there anyone that has experience with them, are they good scopes, would you buy another. Or does anyone know of a supplier in or around Pensacola - Milton? I'd really like to check it out in person prior to buying it personally. Link attached below for reference, thanks for any information in advance.

SAI Optics™ model SAI 6™

Armament Technology is the OEM Manufacture of Tangent Theta Riflescopes, Tenebraex Flip Covers and Accessories & Master Distributor for SAI & ELCAN. We are a major supplier to Defense Security & Sporting markets Globally.

armament.com

 

[kylo1597]

Check out C_DOES review on YouTube. He does a fantastic job of showing you every aspect of the scopes he reviews. Clarity, fisheye, distortion, brightness, tracking and comparative side by side with other scopes.



FWIW, i have 2 trijicon 1-6 LPVO’s. One accupoint and one credo hx. Both are absolutely fantastic. He does a review on those as well

 

[ComenGetem]

Thank you, much appreciated.

 

[Glassaholic]

I did a review on Snipers Hide (well not really, it was more an evaluation) of the SAI 6 with Vortex Gen3 1-10 and March 1-10 shorty. I actually really liked the SAI 6 as an all-purpose LPVO, it wasn't perfect but a great optic for the price. I don't know of any local suppliers but can connect you with an out of state dealer who can give you a great price if you decide to go that route.

 

[ComenGetem]

@Glassaholic thank you, I read your evaluation of the scope, that's good stuff. As far as clarity goes, I've noticed that when looking through a Leupold its almost brighter than just using your eye alone. I can't say that for a fact but that's how it seems sometimes. Does the Sai 6 seem darker looking through it in the evening or low light environments? I'm just curious, as some scopes have seemed darker than it actually was outside. The turrets don't seem like a factor as this won't be going on a DMR and I'm not a Day light bright snob although the Sai does seem dimmer then most. Just trying to get an all-around feel for it. Though it has a good price point it's still fairly high for a poor boy like me.

 

[Glassaholic]

@Glassaholic thank you, I read your evaluation of the scope, that's good stuff. As far as clarity goes, I've noticed that when looking through a Leupold its almost brighter than just using your eye alone. I can't say that for a fact but that's how it seems sometimes. Does the Sai 6 seem darker looking through it in the evening or low light environments? I'm just curious, as some scopes have seemed darker than it actually was outside. The turrets don't seem like a factor as this won't be going on a DMR and I'm not a Day light bright snob although the Sai does seem dimmer then most. Just trying to get an all-around feel for it. Though it has a good price point it's still fairly high for a poor boy like me.

Hey CG, so a few things going on here. When we talk about brightness between scopes we need to make sure we are comparing apples to apples. So when you say:

I've noticed that when looking through a Leupold its almost brighter than just using your eye alone.

TLDR - go to the next post for the short answer

I need to understand which scope, which magnification and what light levels. I'm going to make some assumptions here and you can correct me if I'm wrong. Since you are asking about the SAI 6 I'm going to assume the Leupold you were looking through was also an LPVO, so let's say you were looking through a Mark 6 1-6x20. Let's also assume that you had the scope set to 6x magnification and you were looking through the scope about 20 minutes after the sun set and noticed that with the scope you could actually see details in shadow at an object about 100 yards away that you could not see with your naked eye. So with that established let's start breaking this down. First, let me explain to you my understanding of the magnification effect. You look at an object 100 yards away and struggle to discern what it is because it is dark in shadow, but you use a 6x scope or binocular and suddenly you see all kinds of detail you could not see before and feel the image looks brighter - I would posit a challenge for you, go out this evening after sunset and look at an object about 100 yards away, now look at it with your scope at 6x and you notice you see a lot more detail, but now quickly move 6x closer to the object (about 17' away instead of 300' away) and as long as you were able to get there in a decent amount of time does the object appear brighter to you? The effect you are experiencing is more a magnification effect, but one other thing manufacturers can do is alter their multi-coating process to actually help with brightness in low light, more on that later. So your scope is giving you a combination of magnification and detail which play a big role with perceived brightness that our brain interprets.

Now let's talk about the mechanics of a scope and it's optical characteristics, specifically I want to talk about exit pupil, and in a perfect world exit pupil is a very simple calculation of the front objective diameter divided by the magnification, so in the case of the Mark 6 we could say at 6x the exit pupil is 3.33mm (20 ÷ 6); however, there is no perfect world in optics designs so we can't always guarantee exit pupil will be this value especially at the low end of the magnification - why is that you ask, because manufacturers will purposefully reduce the exit pupil in some scopes in order to help correct other characteristics about the scope; however, for the sake of argument, let's just go with this simple formula (objective ÷ magnification).

So what does 3.33mm give us and why does exit pupil matter, well during the day it may not matter much because we have this huge illuminator in the sky called the sun and our eyes will constrict to compensate for how bright it is outside, but when the the sun goes down and light begins to fade our eyes begin to dilate and as we transition into scotopic vision our eyes begin to switch from cones to rods which also has an effect on our perception of brightness. The average human eye pupil can go from 1.5mm all the way to about 8mm, so the exit pupil of the scope directly relates to what our eye can handle, if it's bright sun and our eye has constricted to 1.5mm but our scopes exit pupil is at 4mm then we won't notice the difference in general between that and a scope that is sending 8mm of light because both scopes are giving us more light than our eye can take in (there are other benefits to having 8mm but that'll be a discussion for another day); however, when light gets low and our pupil begins to dilate to say 7mm, well now that scope that delivers 8mm vs. the scope that delivers 4mm will make a big difference because the 4mm exit pupil scope is actually giving our eye less light than it can handle.

But that's not the only thing that effects how we perceive brightness. Manufacturers have figured out that different multi-coatings on glass surfaces can help with perceived brightness as well as light transmission, the very glass that is used also has an effect on this. Some manufacturers even capitalize on clever marketing terms like "High Transmission" glass (but don't get too caught up in that because I've seen some scopes that advertise high transmission that did not perform as well in low light than other scopes that did not advertise). As light passes through each glass element of the optical design it looses effectiveness where some of the light is reflected off the surface or absorbed due to the nature of the glass so by the time the light gets to your eye it does not have as many photons as what entered through the front objective. Some manufactures will list a spec for light transmission and you'll see numbers like 90%, 92% or sometimes >92% et al; however, sometimes even these numbers can be misleading because those transmissions may have been calculated based on a certain wavelength and one measurement/wavelength may be more beneficial than another measurement/wavelength. At the end of the day the term "you get what you pay for" generally applies with any optical design. So if a high end manufacturer advertises 90% light transmission for a $4000 scope and a "cheap" manufacturer or model line advertises 92% light transmission for a $400 scope, I can probably guarantee that the more expensive scope with advertised less light transmission will perform better. The other thing that multi-coating can do is help eliminate or create a color cast, our eyes are sensitive to certain colors (some more so than others) so mfr's have found ways to fool our brains into thinking an image is brighter simply because of the color cast. I've seen a lot of scopes with a blue color cast to them and my eyes are extremely sensitive to this, it drives me nuts honestly as I much prefer a neutral to warm color cast.

The next thing I want to talk about is "perceived" brightness. When I do many of my reviews I clarify that my brightness testing is based on what my brain interprets as my eye seeing - I call this perceived brightness and it can be different for different people based on a number of factors which include how your eyes work, your age, if you have any eye issues, etc. I have definitely noticed that as I've gotten older (in my mid 50's now) my ability to perceive brightness in lower light levels has gotten worse. I have a number of tests for low light testing but the main ones are color fidelity and high contrast and low contrast charts and there have been times where the perceived brightness of scope A did not seem as bright as scope B but when looking at my test chart I can actually see higher contrast with scope A - so brightness may not always be the driving factor for seeing detail which is often necessary to get PID and take the shot. Let's be honest, would you rather have a bright blurry image or a detailed image that may not be as bright?

In closing, a lot of scopes look great and are very hard to discern differences during bright daylight sun, but I guarantee that you will begin to see differences, sometimes major differences, when the light levels get low which is why I always try to do low light testing because if a scope shows excellent micro contrast and detail in low light it will also do this in bright light even when we may not be able to perceive that difference during the day. Sometimes you will hear comments made from competitive shooters that go something like this, "I was using scope A during a competition and really struggled to see distant targets especially in shadow, but when I switched to scope B I was able to pick them right up". This example between A and B is common because most people do their "testing" during the day and most of the time scope A looks just as good, but its the nuanced details that can matter and make the difference between quickly identifying your target or missing it during a scan of the field in front of you and low light testing will help separate the wheat from the chaff. This, by and large, is what many higher end manufacturers will spend a lot of R&D money on to understand and why those scopes typically cost a lot more than "cheaper" scopes. That being said, as technology increases and manufacturing processes improve we are beginning to see lower priced scopes performing better and better.

 

[Glassaholic]

That is a very long way to get to the answer to your question:

Does the Sai 6 seem darker looking through it in the evening or low light environments? I'm just curious, as some scopes have seemed darker than it actually was outside.

For me personally, I felt the SAI 6 did very well in low light. For this particular review I did not do my full evaluation testing so I could not say for certain, but I believe you will be pleasantly surprised. The SAI 6 is designed by ATI who also makes Tangent Theta; however, the scope is manufactured by a Japanese OEM that is well known for other highly successful LPVO designs so I would venture to say that the SAI 6 is likely to hold up similarly to other Japanese products within this price point - that is to say it is going to be very good.

Will the SAI 6 be “as bright” as the Leupold you experienced, unfortunately only you will be able to discern that due to the above factors – objective size, magnification, multi-coating, glass used and so forth. Leupold is a company who has done a lot of investment into glass and multi-coating and they have some pretty impressive scopes, but at the end of the day it comes down to “the eye of the beholder”. I’m sorry I cannot give you anything more definitive than that but hopefully this helps you a little bit in your search.

 

[Glassaholic]

One other comment I'll make - with all scopes it is important to setup the diopter correctly to your eye and with some scopes it's important to fine tune the diopter using the lowest magnification where you can still see the FFP (first focal plane) reticle clearly using the blue sky or blank wall method, but after setting it up there I would suggest resetting the diopter with micro adjustments while looking at objects far, far away, then tweak at 1000 and then tweak again around 500 and finally at 100 then go back to 1000 - by doing this fine tuning you will setup your diopter for ideal IQ at multiple distances because I have seen way too often with blue sky/blank wall there is a broad range that "looks good" but may not be quite where it should be so fine tuning will help dial your scope in much better. However, for a LPVO that goes down to 1x you want to setup your diopter at 1x so you get a true 1x experience - ever heard a guy say "my LPVO isn't a true 1x" well I can just about guarantee they setup their diopter improperly as you can literally watching your scope magnification alter when you twist through a fast focusing diopter.

Recap, for long range scopes - fine tune your diopter at distance. For LPVO's that start at 1x, adjust your diopter until you see a true 1x image.

 

[ComenGetem]

@Glassaholic A lot of the words you used I honestly had to look up for that one lol. However, I appreciate you breaking that down for me. It truly helped me to better understand what was going on in different processes that I, for lack of better a better word, was ignorant to. Scopes are costly and a genuine, honest answer is really helpful as I can't just go out and try scope after scope. You pretty much nailed it when you said the Leupold Mark 6. I had the Eotech Vudu 1-6, and it seemed much darker at low light then the Mark 6 did on the same magnification setting. So, knowing what you just explained to me now, makes a lot more sense as to why it seemed that way. I'm still trying to sort out all the information I can, when it comes to scopes and firearms in a whole. The more informed I am, the better off I am in the long run. Being self-taught in this hobby can be a daunting task sometimes. To many people would rather troll or put out their own consensus without knowing much about it themselves. However, I regress. Thank you for the information and honest feedback I greatly appreciate it. Looks like I will be at least procuring the Sai 6 and seeing if it is something I prefer. You definitely made this purchasing process a lot easier.