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Cheap, Plastic, and Auto Everything - Viridian RFX11
Updated
34 months ago
Good morning, everyone, hope you're all having a wonderful day today. Today, we're taking a look at a very interesting little red dot, or in this case a green dot, this is the Viridian RFX11.
Getting into full disclosure on the Viridian RFX11, they did send this out to us for free so we did not pay for it whatsoever, so just keep that in mind going forward.
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Getting into the Viridian RFX11 on paper, there are a lot of things that I strongly dislike about it on paper, so a couple of the major things is that this is a polymer red dot. So, this is not Aluminum it's not 6061, it's not 7075, this is a ‘high strength polymer’ that they make this green dot out of. On top of that, this is an auto-adjusting green dot, meaning that there is no brightness controls, it has a sensor that will automatically adjust to whatever sort of lighting condition that you're in. Both of those things I am fairly apprehensive of and I have avoided them up until this point. Externally, the only controls on the optic whatsoever are two tiny little Allen screws for adjusting the windage and elevation, other than that the red dot is what it is.
Getting into the footprint, this is the RMSc footprint, so this will mount natively to a lot of different micro handguns, this is one of the more popular cut for the more slim style of handguns, this is the Smith and Wesson Shield Plus, which is cut directly for the RMSc footprint, so it matches up perfectly, no real issues there.
Getting into the size and weight on the Viridian RFX11, because it is mostly polymer it comes in at a whopping .44 ounces, in fact the only steel on it is I believe the mounting screws and the adjustment screws, and then you have a little bit of glass and the rest of it is basically polymer with some internals as well.The window size on the RFX11 is actually pretty good, even for an RMSc style optic, so it is still a small thin optic, but the window size is 16x22, which is actually fairly decent, it is one of the bigger/smaller windows, if that makes sense for you, more of your micro carry compacts.
The reticle option, it is a 3 MOA green dot. The dot itself does seem bigger than 3 MOA, if I had to guess I would say it's closer to 6 MOA, but for a dedicated carry optic something like that I think 6 MOA is perfectly acceptable, it's very fast, it's very quick to put onto target, super simple, nothing really to go wrong with it whatsoever, I prefer a simple 3-6 MOA dot versus some of the 32 MOA outer circles where it gets a little bit cluttered.
As far as glass quality goes on the RFX11, it is actually surprisingly good, there's almost no tint to the glass whatsoever, at least to my eyes it looks very, very good, there is a little bit of warping, a little bit of magnification, if you move it around a little bit you can see the image starts to warp just a little bit, which is very common on pistol red dots of basically every variety. However, the glass quality itself looks very good with almost no tint whatsoever.
Let's go ahead and get into the battery life combined with the feature set of an auto-adjusting green dot. So, battery life is I believe from a 2032 or a 1632, I don't remember, on the bottom of the optic, so this is a bottom-loading battery. To swap out the battery you will need to take the optic off, swap out the battery, put the optic back on, and then probably re-zero or at least find to new zero back to where it should be. Rated battery life is at 30, 000 hours with a auto-adjusting green dot and Auto on/ Auto off technology, so it will automatically turn off after two minutes and then it will automatically turn back on once it senses any sort of motion.
With a auto-adjusting dot, which we'll go ahead and talk about now, it has worked basically perfectly in every lighting condition that I've used it, in from pitch black to direct sunlight it will adjust very quickly and to the proper brightness level. When I say proper brightness level I mean maybe one click higher than I would normally have it, so maybe like right now it is probably maybe one click higher than perfectly acceptable optimal sort of brightness, so it does kind of hedge its bets towards the brighter side, which is probably where it should, it's better to have a dot that's a little bit brighter and still easy to pick up, put on target than to have a dot that's a little bit dimmer and it's hard to put on target because it's hard to pick up, hard to see in certain lighting conditions, so on and so forth.
So, the auto brightness has worked perfectly so far, I have been carrying this optic in the Shield Plus every day for the last month or so, and in every lighting condition, every time I play around with it, dry fire it anywhere from pitch black to direct sunlight, the auto-adjusting dot has worked very well, in fact perfectly up, until this point. So, 30,000-hour battery life combined with Auto on/Auto off, combined with the fact that if you're carrying the gun the dot is probably going to be on in its lowest brightness setting, and then as soon as you draw it, it will auto obviously turn up to a higher brightness setting, depending on your ambient lighting, meaning that I would suspect that the real world battery life is actually quite a bit better considering most of the time that you're carrying it, as long as it's covered up,It's probably going to be on its lowest brightness setting, because it's going to be under closed and in a holster, supposedly anyways, depending on how you're carrying it, versus like, let's say, a non-auto-adjusting red dot where it will be at whatever brightness setting you have it pinned to, so if you're walking around in full daylight and it's at a much higher brightness setting it is going to be draining that battery a lot faster than something like this, when it's concealed will be automatically at its lowest brightness level and then adjust when you need to use it.
So, it is interesting and I'm not a big fan of the concept of auto-adjusting red dots, I would much rather just have direct control of whatever brightness level that I want it to be at. However, in practice, and actually using it, it has worked perfectly fine and I think that it does combo very well with auto-adjusting plus Auto on/Auto off, I think that it will conserve that battery life, if that's something that you're worried about keep in mind that it is fairly annoying to have a bottom mounted battery that you will need to re-zero the optic or at least find to new re-zero a little bit to get it back to perfect.
30,000 hours, plus Auto on, plus Auto off, plus auto-adjusting, you're probably not going to need to change out the battery for five to ten years, depending on how much you use the optic itself. If you're carrying it every day keep in mind that it's going to be at the lowest brightness level until you actually draw it out, and if you're not carrying it it's going to be off the entire time, so unless there's some sort of parasitic vampire effect with the battery life, the battery life could last five to ten years, if not longer, depending on your use case, how much you're using it, so on and so forth.
Talking about the other thing that I have a strong dislike for on paper is going to be the polymer body. Polymer is just in no way shape or form as strong as 6061 or 7075, all the Holosun dots that I usually carry are 7075 and they are incredibly durable for pistol optics from a wide variety of circumstances, you can watch torture tests on a lot of them, and in general they hold up very, very well, even compared to some of the most expensive optics on the market. With a polymer green dot in this case you're just not going to get that level of durability, it's just not going to have the same sort of crush rating, crack rating, anything like that, polymer is very lightweight, but it's just in no way shape or form gonna be as strong as a well-designed 7075 Aluminum optic.
The intended use case for this optic is probably concealed carry or maybe home defense, but for a micro green dot I would say it's probably suited for concealed carry, and not much more. So, what sort of durability do you need for a concealed carry green dot? Well, maybe you are okay with a polymer body.
I did some drop testing with the optic because polymer , I'm pretty skeptical on a pistol dot, I don't know why I would ever choose polymer over aluminum, I don't care about a half ounce, I would rather have a much more durable optic. I did some drops test on the optic, I did two waist height drops, not shoulder height drops, because I didn't think it would survive them at all, so I did two waist height drops onto dirt and gravel basically to see if that would just completely destroy the optic, and if it would lose zero because the polymer is not going to be rigid as aluminum, so I didn't know if a couple mediocre knocks would take it off of zero.
For the drop test I had a target setup at 30 yards, it was a 10x16 steel plate, not the smallest target out there, not the biggest target out there, pretty indicative of what you're goingto be doing for concealed carry distances, probably a little bit further than what most people would anticipate using, but I went ahead and did a couple rounds just to make sure that it was on target with the ammo that I was using, I believe I was using 115 grain Callaway Ballistics remanufactured ammo, performed perfectly fine, then I did a waist height drop directly on the top of the optic, did a few more rounds, worked perfectly fine, did the second drop onto the top of the optic from waist height, did a few more rounds and it continued to hit the target at 30 yards without much issue, and the body did scuff up a little bit, the glass didn't crack, the polymer didn't crack, it didn't shift zero to a tremendous degree.
So, it does have some level of durability, however, it's still not confidence inspiring compared to aluminum, which you could do shoulder height drops onto concrete with a good Holosun dot and it's not going to have that big of an effect.
Polymer, I don't like the idea. Is it durable enough for most people's concealed carry application? Probably, but it's not something that I wouldever prefer
This does have some features, if you like the auto-adjusting you put it on a red dot and you never think about the brightness level because at this point the auto-adjustment has worked perfectly, if you like green dots that is Viridian's thing. When it comes to price I believe these are right now 160 dollars, so it is definitely on the cheaper side of optics, however, it's not that cheap and you can start to get into Holosun dots for about 200-ish dollars and they're gonna be a lot stronger and have about the same feature set, side-loading batteries versus bottom-loading batteries.
I think the Viridian RFX11 could be a good buy for certain people, if you like the green dot that is your thing, you like the auto-adjusting brightness, it does have a very good battery life, you're probably never going to switch out the battery life to begin with a very, very extended run time, it's durable enough, but not necessarily confidence inspiring. If it was a little bit cheaper, anywhere from like 100 to 120 dollars, I think that would be a very interesting buy because then you could get a red dot or a green dot on your pistol without spending that much money, and it would be about half the cost of some of the nicer red dots or green dots on the market, I think that would be a more compelling buy at a little bit lower of a price category.
Keep in mind that on most guns or at least most well-designed concealed carry guns, even if your red dot/green dot cracks, shatters, goes down, whatnot, you still have your iron sights as backups, but that's going to vary on gun to gun, what sites you have on it, so on and so forth. On the Shield Plus, if the green dot does go down for whatever reason I have my iron sights in the window anyway, so it's not that big of a deal.
So, if you're on a super tight budget and you like the green dot, you like the auto-adjustment and you're willing to live with the polymer body, maybe it can make sense for most people, if you do have a couple hundred bucks and you're willing to spend a little bit more I would go with the Holosun dot still or some other comparable aluminum bodied optic, those I personally have more faith in. The auto-adjustment, it's worked perfectly, so that aspect of it really doesn't hold it back for me personally at this point, even though, on paper, it's not something that I love, it has worked and so I don't really find that to be an issue on this particular green dot.
