I buy mostly used airguns and in the process, get a lot of, shall we say, "less than desirable" scopes. A while ago, I bought a second FX Royale in .22, and on board, was one of "those" scopes. A Centerpoint 4-16X40 scope. Upon opening the box, I immediately noted the scope, took it off and replaced it with something more appropriate. The CP went to the junk box in the shop for quite a while. Time passes, I get bored one day and ran onto the CP in the shop and got to thinking what I might do with it. I mounted it on my R10, which I was working on at the time and needed to shoot. What the heck, I just need some crude info and chrono data, it'll work for that, right? After shooting a few groups, I noticed, that I was chrono'ing at 35 yards, not paying a lot of attention to the groups, but I was aiming at a dot on the target just to keep my line over the chrono steady. Well, heck, something like 20 shots in a 3/8" group. Holy cow! Now I'm really curious, so I pull out some targets, calculate the clicks at 35 yards and proceed to box test the CP, it wan't close.....it was PERFECT! As close as I could measure, it was dead on. I continued to crank around, shooting a shot, back to another groups, and back and forth...tiny groups all around. Ok, I'm amazed. I messed with parallax and power settings with no shift in impact. An $89 scope. Did I mention that when I really looked through this scope, it is so clear it's amazing, even at 16X. Now, let's be real, it is not the brightest scope, expecially at 16X, but it's not bad. The view is contrasty til you get above 12X, and the eye box it pretty critical at above 12X, but hey, I have expensive scopes with that problem. Shooting into the sun is also a bit challenging with flare.
At this point, I thought, you know what, this scope has earned it's position on the Royale it had come on. So on it went and sighted in at 35 yards. After a lot of shooting, and amazement, I put the rifle away for a long while, only getting it out once in a while and firing a few shots, then back to the safe.
Lately, there's been some talk of 100 yard shooting and I had tried it the first time with my Brck Sniper .22 and a Hawke AM 30 3-12X, and it got me to thinking about how well the CP tracked. Would it work at 100 yards? Out it came, I did the math, cranked in 18" of elevation and rested the Royale on the bed of my truck, shooting at a orange plastic beer bottle hanging target at 100 yards. BANG! I hit it the first shot. Then 11 out of 12 shots with the bottle swinging from a very gently breeze and from the previous hits. I couldn't best my 11 of 12, but i did repeat it twice. I was shooting into the setting sun, and it was hard to see sometimes and the critical eye box demanded perfection in head placement, but hey, it worked.
So, I have to admit, this is a pink unicorn of a scope. I can't imagine that ever CP 4-16 is this good, but I'm sure amazed at this one. Shooting in a normally lit yard without the sun directly in your face is no problem at all. If I had bought this scope, and at $89 I saw online, that would have to be, the single best dollar-to-quality ratio of any scope made, period.