Bad Burris Experience (XTR III)

[toddm]

In the past I've had really good experiences with Burris going back many years.  However recently I had a pretty bad experience with them on a 5.5-30x XTR III.  I wanted to try out the XTR III to replace a few older Vortex PST Gen 2's, especially after hearing how great the optic was.  When it arrived I was pretty quickly disappointed. 

 

The scope was purchased new from a dealer and had 2 issues. 

1) The windage knob was extremely mushy/soft, you could not hear or feel the clicks.  It felt like two different scopes between the elevation/windage knob.

2) The elevation knob had a ton of lash/slop in it, enough to get half way to the next mark on the optic, but the clicks were solid.

 

Erector Lash

 

I contacted Burris with a video of the lash in the elevation knob and they had me return it for repair. Turn around was super fast, less than 2 weeks total, which was awesome. However when it arrived back there were really no details on what they fixed.   The windage knob was much better, solid clicks and no lash, I found out later they replaced a "pin".   However the elevation knob still had lots of lash/free play in it. I contacted Burris a second time, they said it was likely the repair tech missed fixing it, they would add extra notes and they had me send it in a second time.  It again returned quickly in less than two weeks.  However they didn't fix anything in the elevation knob and just included a note that the optic met all factory specifications.   At first I thought well maybe it's not a big deal, but I did tall target test it and you could see the reticle shift when the knob moved through the free play.  Also since the indicator tends to settle in the middle of two marks you can't visually tell if you dialed 0.4 mil or 0.5 mils because it's sitting at 0.45mil.   I've had 100's of optics in my last 35 years of shooting and I can't remember one that had that much play in it from $250 to $3000.  I get that all erectors have some lash in them, but this to me is way too much for what they consider a $1750 MRSP optic.   It does seem to be a weakness in the XTR III design cause I've heard others complain of it as well.

 

Accepting at this point they were not going to repair/replace it I asked about perhaps upgrading to an XTR Pro since it seems like the XTR III was not up to my expectations.  The response was that I could but the upgrade would be $1000.   Now keep in mind I can buy a new XTR Pro today for $1445.  So to ask me to pay $1000 (probably + tax and shipping so call it $1150) to give them a $1100 optic to upgrade to a $1500 optic seems a bit out of line.   They were probably just looking at the delta between MSRP.

 

Maybe it's Beretta being more difficult than normal since they own Burris.   I recently had problems with a Sako S20 where the original mag design tends to cause feeding problems (well documented) when I contacted Beretta they said they knew there was an issue with the original mags, and they had upgraded mags available, but would not replace them, and instead offered me a 10% code so I could buy them in their webstore.