In a few hours I have to get on the plane, but in the meantime I found a coffeeshop and decided to check my e-mail. Naturally, I ended up doing a quick glance through a couple of forums. The ones I usually look at are SnipersHide, 24HourCampFire and OpticsTalk. Once in a while I also visit ARF, but the moderators there are sufficiently obnoxious that unless someone specifically asks me to look at a particular thread, I do not feel like dealing with the nonsense. It seems to be one of those not uncommon situations where even a little bit of power makes normal people into absolute douchebags.

This particular snippet is from 24HourCampFire. It is a primarily a hunting forum and I often find a very different take on things there. However, I do hunt and, more importantly, I plan to do a large hunting scope comparison in the not too distant future. To top it off, the gentleman who runs the forum there is a good friend, so I pay attention.

Here is an interesting post I found there: "So I bought a Burris Fast Fire 3 and put it on a camo 870 12 gauge with a 26" barrel. This was my duck gun and turkey gun ( with open beads ) now I guess it's my turkey gun, but I hate it and here's why..................I can't stand seeing the barrel and the mid bead and the front bead AND the red dot. I just want a clean sight picture of just the red dot and I imagine I would need about 1.25X to only see the bead and the turkey. Does anybody make a red dot with just enough magnification to get you out past the barrel and bead? I can't be the only one that hates the view and I won't go back to the beads as I've called in three in the last six years that got too close and I missed and around here with as few gobblers as we have that's not good. I guess the only trade off would be you would have to get your eye directly behind the dot and not have the ability to see the dot and pull the trigger even on the opposite shoulder."

He has a Burris FastFire 3 on his SpeedBead mount (https://bit.ly/3yX6je9) which allows you keep the red dot sight pretty low. That helps with cheekweld using perfectly conventional shotgun stocks. Now, personally, if I were looking at Burris red dot sights, I would easily go for the FastFire 4. I have really learned to appreciate that you can run it as an enclosed RDS and switch reticle around: https://bit.ly/3zoDWa5

That aside, the question he asks is quite important in that it shows a significant amount of ignorance of how red dot sights work. It likely comes from the fact the there used to be red dot sights with magnification, but they are essentially, reflex sights with small magnifiers built in. That sorta makes them look like prismatic scope in terms of form factor and, in the modern market, I can't think of a single reason why you would take a red dot with a built in magnifier over a normal prismatic scope.

One way to think about this is that red dot sights (and holographics) are non-focusing weapon sights. Essentially, it is supposed to be like looking through a window that somehow superimposes a dot onto whatever you are aiming at. You are not looking at a lens train that creates focal planes, etc. To have magnification, you need that lens train, but then you are dealing with the optics that essentially re-creates the image and presents it to your eye. That is very different than looking through a window at something.
Now, there are some red dot sights there that have a design flaw, so there is a tiny bit of magnification, but it is there by mistake and it makes everything worse. It is, essentially, just unintentional distortion in that case. If you want magnification, get a normal focusing optic (conventional scope, prismatic, etc).

The whole concept of magnification is really not applicable to red dot sights. A riflescope can be 1x: it sees an image, massages it, focuses it on some inner focal plane or two and then spits it out to your eye looking exactly (hopefully) the same as it came in except with the aiming point superimposed. A red dot sight, does not do any of that. It just gets an aiming point in front of your eye while trying to distort the image as little as possible.

That's why there is a perspective difference between red dot sights and riflescopes. It is only apparent at very short distances, but with a riflescope, the perspective from which you are looking at the target is located where the objective lens is. With a red dot sight, the perspective from which you are looking at the target is located where your eye is.