After the 2013 hunting season I decided I needed a new rifle for uncontrolled conditions like late-season deer drives. I ended up ordering a Rock River Arms LAR-8, and it just so happened that at the same time, I was given the opportunity to review any of the new scopes on offer from Burris.
Knowing the conditions I’d use the rifle in, I decided on a variable-power scope with a low setting, one with a good field of view, and one that had a reticle that offered bullet drop compensation. The Burris Veracity 2x-10x-42 offered all this and more. Burris also offers 3x-15x, 4x-20x and 5x-20x with 50mm objective lenses in the Veracity line. All come with a 30mm main tube.
The Veracity offers a 5x zoom system that yields both a wide field of view on low magnification and powerful ranging capabilities on high magnification. The front focal plane reticle allows for accurate distance estimation at any magnification. Not only does the Veracity offer bullet drop compensation, but it also provides windage compensation marks. There are marks for 5- and 10-mph crosswinds out to 500 yards. The Veracity also has a side-adjustable parallax for quick adjustments.
Tough And Ready
My first impressions of the scope were all favorable. It is very well built, and, as always with any Burris I have handled, the optics quality was better than you would expect from a scope of its price point. Low-light visibility is exceptional. The magnification adjustment knob is pleasantly large and tactile, though stiff on my example.
The side parallax adjustment knob has deep knurls and had a smooth feel. The windage and elevation covers have similar knurling, and the adjustment knobs have .25 MOA adjustments — and the knobs can be set to zero once sighted-in. Overall build quality is extremely solid — it looks like it was designed to take abuse — and the 22.7-ounce weight indicates that as well. My example weighed in at 22.6 ounces.
Sight-in with the Burris was a breeze. There had been a month between the arrival of my new RRA LAR-8 and the Burris Veracity. In the meantime, I had placed an older Leupold VX-1 3-9 on the LAR-308. During sighting-in of the Leupold, I noticed a significant discrepancy in the amount of adjustment needed and the actual input necessary to achieve that adjustment. I needed four MOA of adjustment to see a three-MOA movement on paper.
The Burris Veracity, on the other hand, was spot on for both windage and elevation. As a result, sight-in took much less time and less ammunition than it had with the Leupold.
Pros And Cons
So what’s not to like? Not much, but there are a few points I would like to bring up. First, while the parallax knob is nice to have on the Veracity, it is not that important to have on the 2x-10x-42 offering, but could be welcome in the higher magnification offerings in the Veracity line.
Second, and this is a potential weakness of all front focal plane scopes, the reticle can be hard to pick up under low light conditions, especially on the lowest power settings. Burris seems to have tried to mitigate this as much as possible when designing the reticle, with some success. Lastly, the scope is not exactly light at 22.7 ounces. Burris obviously designed the scope to withstand abuse, but that also means it probably wouldn’t be someone’s first choice to put on a mountain rifle.
Final Thoughts
No longer is a scope just a metal tube with crosshairs. Today’s scopes have a set of features meant to fill a role among a diverse hunting public. The Veracity definitely has a solid place in the Burris product line. The list price on the 2-10 Veracity is $900, but a quick check on street price shows that the Veracity can be purchased in the $600 range.
At that price, the Veracity has an extremely attractive feature set for someone looking for a high-quality big-game hunting scope that can take the abuse that inevitably seems to happen during any hunt.
