PLxC 1.5-12x: Thanks, I hate it

Hey guys, BrassVax here. Ever since Primary Arms discontinued the 2.5 to 10x GLX, there has been a dumbbell-sized medium power hole in my heart. And given that Primary Arms has been releasing a lot of bangers recently, but yet still hadn't filled their sort of medium range scope category, I think a lot of us have been waiting for quite some time now for them to essentially re-release the GLX 2.5 to 10x in some form or another. Well, recently they did exactly that with the PLX-E RDB 1.5 to 12x. That's a mouthful. And on paper, it looks really exciting. I went out and bought a PLX 1.5 to 12x to go check it out for myself because I really kind of wanted another MPVO. And like I said, on paper, this thing looked quite promising. $2,000 and a long pre-order wait later, I finally got one in hand. I've been shooting it on my iCar all the way out to $1,000. Also on my Mark 1, sort of 400 yards and in. And boy, do I have a lot of thoughts about this thing. Stay tuned. This video was brought to you by Modern Warriors, your number one go-to choice for when whatever you want doesn't show up on your default Google search. Or the Optics Planet website has crashed six times in a row while checking out and you've completely lost your mind. Not really. For some reason, Modern Warriors is really good about having what you want when no one else does, especially with the sort of less common nicer products. It's where I got my Mark 1, A300, and the Prodigy when it was kind of hard to get. And so much more. The PLX-E denotation of this product goes beyond just classifying this as a primary arms platinum line optic. This optic is staggeringly close to a PLX-E RDB 1-8X LPVO, except now it goes to 12. That's it. That's the review. If you want to get in and out of here instantly, done, right? But for those that haven't messed with a PLX-E RDB or just need some white noise during lunch, let's thunder run the feature set, starting with the reticle, which is a PLX-E reticle one for one. Like all PA reticles, these ACSS designs are extremely hard on for auto ranging features, and this is no exception. I'm a fan of auto ranging, so these reticles bug me less than most, but these are undoubtedly some of the busiest reticles you'll encounter with multiple, sometimes redundant ways of ranging. And I do kind of wish they toned it down a notch or two. Extra features are useful, of course, but so is the ability to miss, see the miss, cope, call it a spoiler shot, and then make a correction, or just observe targets through the Fortunately, bullying does in fact work, and each progressive PA product has featured a less and less prominent chevron, to the point where here, it's just branding at this point and acts well enough as a center dot to aim at. Let's pivot real quick to the low end with the 1.5x. Like the PLX-E LPVO, this is very flat and smooth, with a sort of bezel-less design. No warping, and the reticle is scaled well enough that you can see it against varied backdrops no problem. I'd say this 1.5x is close enough to a 1x to work as a speedy center aiming solution at about 60-150 yards, where you don't really need to dial magnification, and you want that extra wide field of view and situational awareness. This is further aided by the red dot bright illumination. While I argue red dot bright illumination is significantly less relevant than on a true 1x LPVO, it is still a useful quality of life thing, preventing you from hunting for your reticle as your gun settles between shots, against black backdrops, and during dusk or dawn conditions. Like the PLX-E and Nightforce offerings, when you need to move your head off-axis, it will dim and flicker at the higher magnification levels, an unfortunate aspect of how this technology is done by light optical works, which if you care, is one of the areas where the Leopold Mk5 pulls ahead at. The flip side though, the RDB line has an auto-on auto-off feature for this, and in many instances of shooting it, I'll turn it on, use it all day, put it in my range bag, and then the next range trip I come out, maybe a week down the line, I'll pull it out of the bag, and well, there it is, the red dot is still on, bright and kicking. Just a very nice quality of life feature. My only real gripe with the illumination is that it displays under the drop dots, sort of like a drop shadow illumination thing, which is fine, doesn't matter in dusk and conditions, but in very rare situations where you're shooting into deep shadows during the daytime, that lack of contract has sort of manifested itself as sometimes losing what you're aiming at. Overall, while I think this technology, once again, unneeded on an LPVO, and a cheaper $1400 PLX-E 1.5x would have been really compelling, it of course is a neat quality of life thing, and I use it almost all the time. It's very important to note, however, despite this 1.5x being very flat, clear, bezel-less, easy to use with bright illumination, the best 1.5x is still notably worse than the worst 1x on an LPVO, and for true both-eyes-open collimated shooting, that is the image of both your shooting eye and your off-eye blend into one seamlessly to create one image, like with a red dot sight or a good LPVO, is just not going to occur with a 1.5x, even though you have both your eyes open, still focusing in on that singular image. So, you're going to want to pair this with a red dot sight for 10-50 yards, unless you're okay shedding some speed and intuition of the system, right? I can see it going either way, just keep that in mind. Keeping with the trend of, this was a PLX-E, but now it goes to 12, is the C in the PLX-E. This is a short, compact, extremely lightweight-for-class scope at 20 ounces. I think it's easy to see and hear, you know, compact, oh, it's compact like the Nightforce compact scope. No, you're just not even close. Oh, it's compact like the Mark V? Nope, even smaller than that. Given this is more than likely going on at 5.56 SPR, this is by far the biggest selling point of this scope, and I think it's just really cool. I mean, it looks good too, right? Doesn't it? In fact, this scope is so compact and limited by the forward belt, you're actually going to need to put some serious thought into how exactly you're going to get a red dot on here if you plan on piggybacking. The traditional sort of ring mount that actually attaches to the scope itself will almost certainly not fit. I got this LaRue one to fit, but most designs are just simply too thick. There's just not enough room in there, and I'd recommend probably just doing something like a ring topper, like the Primary Arms PLX-E one, or perhaps a Reptilia, right? Whatever. Look, I don't mean to pad runtime, but, uh, you know, these are some normal scope boxes. What is going on with Primary Arms and Nightforce? Is this like some kind of ******* arms race? Why? Unfortunately, being a PLX-E LPVO scale to 12 also brings some of the downsides of being a PLX-E scale to 12. Take a shot every time I say PLX-E, you will be deceased before you even get to the halfway mark. Anyways, the PLX-E line seems to have a bit of an image issue on the top end, fine for the otherwise great LPVOs, but when we scale to 12, $2,000, and an optic that is centered around the top end, I think that becomes a bit more of a gripe and an issue. While the image is what I would call decent or even good resolution wise, that is you can kind of see fine details and stuff, and the image itself is very flat, much like the 1.5x, if the lighting is anything other than very bright, I think we begin to notice the image come apart really quickly, and you see a ton of chromatic aberrations, areas that look quite quickly ----, and if your head is not perfectly centered, which in fairness, this has a decent eyebox, it will be even worse than that. And shooting this during dusk right out to 1,000, I was generally having issues seeing misses and the know-your-limit targets, and then observing in a forested area, those chromatic aberrations really stuck out to me, and I mostly used it at the 8, maybe 10x, where the image is a little less cruddy during this time. During broad-ass daylight, 12x is fine. I want to be clear, because people tend to struggle with the idea that if something is not amazing, it is god-awful bad. I'd say it's not that bad, right? But for $2,000, I think not that bad is not the bar we should be reaching for, and the competitor like the NX-6 and Mark V and even the Steiner design seem to have a notable leg up here. So, you're not dumb. You can read the title. You know something is coming. If the review maintained this momentum going forward, I would say it's sort of a very competitive option among the premium LPVOs. I will argue that the Mark V sort of takes the cake as the one with the best image clarity across a wide range of lighting conditions, so on and so forth, and it has the full feature set being both compact and with that red dot bright illumination, though still a little bigger than this. On the sort of lower end, if you want to shed some features, maybe you don't like the ACSS-style reticle, want something a little more simplistic, the NX-6 2-12x is also an excellent option. The PLX-E 1.5-12x, God, I love saying that 27 times in a 12-minute time span, sort of ends up as a middle ground scope between these two. Unfortunately, this scope has one glaring Achilles heel, and that is you cannot dial this scope. Okay, that's not technically true. The scope does in fact ship with a replacement to give you an exposed, dialable turret, but these are so phoned in, they may as well not have even bothered. Why? Well, for starters, they're just completely unlocked. Exposed, unlocked turrets move in rifle bags, and against gear, and more. This isn't a hypothetical, this happens all the time. That alone is an instant DQ for usage on a fighting rifle, and something I tolerate on precision guns. Except, this also doesn't have a zero stop, that is, the turrets will keep spinning past your indefinitely, and there's also no way to indicate how many rotations you've done on this turret. So when you forget to recenter back to zero, lose track of how many rotations you've done, or the turret randomly gets bumped, whatever, you have no way of knowing how to get the turret back to zero other than a guessing game. And if you get the 50-50 wrong, oopsie, poopsie, you now have a scope that shoots 10 mils high. Sick. I don't make absolutes often, but the exposed turrets on the PLXC 1.5-12x are so bad they may as well not even exist, because a free-spinning turret with no indicators isn't just a pain in the ass, it's actually a major safety concern. Now, a product isn't bad if it doesn't fit my preferences, I don't want to indicate that. However, this is a review, generally speaking about what I'm interested in from my perspective, and I think there's a lot of misses on the PLXC that make it not suitable for me, and in fact, quite disappointing to me. And I think there's a lot of people that share my opinion of the glass quality, or those that want a scope that can be dialed, because that's what these scopes are for many of us. However, that doesn't mean the scope is necessarily bad, right? The world doesn't exist in either good or bad, based or cringe, there is some nuance in between, and I think a chunk of you want a scope to just pair with a piggyback red dot, where the dot does the 1x, the scope handles the magnification, and because it's on a fighting rifle, you're just holding, so the lack of a turret can be argued to honestly just be an upside, right? Because it's just cap-protected and lightweight, and for that, the PLXC 1.5x is actually a pretty unique, well-designed scope, kind of beating out the Mark V at its own game. It's got versatile holds, 12x magnification, lightweight 19-ounce, very compact form factor with a 36mm objective, all for just $1,000. Wait, what? $1,000? Ah, ----, sorry, wrong scope.