It looks like ZCO introduced a hunting scope in Europe and kept 36mm tube. Personally, I do not hugely care about tube diameter as a standalone characteristic, but opinions seem to vary.
Some people like/dislike the aesthetics. Others, hate the fact that they need to buy mounts that do not work with any other scopes they have.
I am curious what you think.
For reference, here is the thread on the Hide that inspired this: https://www.snipershide.com/shooting/threads/zco-hunter-scope-at-the-iwa-event.7164408/post-10784971
If you do not want to read the whole thing, here is my response from that thread:
Larger tubes do not directly correlate to the eyebox in any way I can think of. In principle, a larger tube allows for more real estate inside the scope, which in some situations gives you design options that MAY help with eyebox. In practice, that's me hedging because I have not really looked at how they do the design on the inside.
Looking through the thread, a few interesting things came up. Keep in mind that I did not go to IWA and I have no insight whatsoever into ZCO's planning or design process.
On 36mm tube:
-there are a couple of possible reasons why they are sticking with that. The most likely is just continuity and marketing. Keeping all of their tubes the same size is a consistent marketing message. I understand that people do not like different mounts. Personally, I could not care less about the mounts. I have a couple of sets of 36mm rings that I use when I need to play with 36mm scopes and I do not find that to be a major inconvenience. To each his own.
-The aesthetic of the scope looks a little different than that of their tactical scope, so it is entirely possible that this is a start of a new line of hunting scopes where they need the tube for some of the higher magnification models.
Now, to be fair, for a hunting scope I would prefer a smaller tube, but it is not a deal breaker. I think TT has the right approach to this where their TT315M and TT315H are 30mm, while the original 315P and 525P are 34mm.
On other 36mm scopes: that does not seem to be catching on a whole lot since Zeiss has moved back to smaller tubes with their V8 scopes (and frankly, the new V8 scopes look better than the old ones to me).
On the other hand, the new TT 7-35x56 is 36mm, so I do not think 36mm is going away any time soon. To re-iterate: if the design benefits from it, I have no problem with it.
On the magnification range: I like the 1.7-12x range. It is near perfect for a general purpose hunting scope that might be used on its own or with a clip-on. I would probably prefer it with a 40-ish mm objective, personally, but that really depends on what other models they are planning.
The spec sheet refers to both 1st and 2nd focal planes. I would guess that means there will be both FFP and SFP models. Dual focal plane is usually called out differently.
That having been said, I sorta take ZCO spec releases with a grain of salt. They still have not fixed their FOV spec that has been wrong from the very beginning. It is a little bit narrower than they state.
With this scope, they are claiming exit pupil of 29mm on 1.7x. Whoever put together the spec table just divided 50mm by 1.7 That is not how exit pupil works on low power with EVERY scope on the market today.
Whoever put that specsheet together wasn't really paying attention, so I do not know what other mistakes are in there.
That aside, I am sure it is going to be a nice scope. I hope they bring some version of it to the US.
Here is the link to ZCO website where they have that silly specsheet: http://www.zcompoptic.com/images/downloads/ZC%20Hunter%20DE.pdf
