[tunabreath]

I'm not sure if my eyes are just messed up, but any magnification on RDS style sights work horridly for me. The magnification (at typical airsoft ranges) causes what you view through the scope to lose alignment with what you view with your other (naked) eye. This completely negates any 'fast target aquisition' advantage that an RDS has over traditional scopes or iron sights, because while you can still get wider peripheral vision by keeping both eyes open (not that you couldn't do that with any other type of optics as well), with magnification, you are stuck aiming with only one eye. It's no different than a traditional illuminated scope.

With 1x magnification, the image you see through the sight with your dominant eye and the image you see through your naked non-dominant eye are identical. This lets your brain superimpose the RDS reticule over either eye, allowing the maximum field of 'aiming vision,' as well as allowing you to aim if either eye or the RDS is obstructed or obscured.

Just comparing, with a 1x open style reflex sight, I can precisely hit a target using either eye at most airsoft ranges.

With a 2x tube style RDS, I can hit targets well enough at any range, but suffer hugely either in the short range pocket (between where my aquisition is slower due to the misalignment and where you're so close that it doesn't matter anymore :P ), or at night, where you can't really see through the scope anymore, only the dot (so you're aiming with the dot inaccurately superimposed over your non-dominant/peripheral vision, or in the event of fogging or mud/etc obscuring the front lens of the RDS.

With a traditional mildot scope (I'm using 4x), I can actually aim better, and more quickly at close range than with a 2x RDS. While it suffers the same misalignment, I can account for it because I can use the dots to adjust my aim (I use the center of the crosshair with my dominant eye, but I have to aim 2 dots right for my non-dominant eye/peripheral vision). This makes it easier to aim than a 2x RDS because there is a permanent point of reference to adjust your aim with, not just a floating dot.
Additionally, the higher magnification obviously helps at long ranges, where you can see the BB flightpath better through the scope and adjust accordingly (I find the mildots help quite a bit here as well).


But that's just me. I'm not sure if it's just my eyes being screwy, or an inherent factor in magnified scopes that other people just deal with.