Cool New Optic, Needs some Tweaks - Xvision HIIT HRD1
Updated
44 months ago
Good morning, everyone, this is John with gun.deals, and today we’re taking a look at a very interesting optic that I hadn’t really seen much, this is the Xvision optics HIIT HRD1.
Getting into full disclosure on the Xvision HIIT HRD1, we have absolutely no affiliation with Xvision Optics, we picked this up with our own money from OpticsPlanet for about 100 buck, which is one of the reasons why I was interested in the optic, I didn’t know basically anything about it, it was fairly cheap, had a fairly decent feature set, and a fairly interesting looks to boot.
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From the pictures online it looked like it was a little bit bigger of an optic but it’s actually not particularly thick, it is a little bit longer like your standard micro red dots, but it’s also pretty slim, so the window size on this optic is 20mmx26, so it’s very squared kind of like if you shrunk down an Eotech window, that’s kind of want you get.
When you’re looking down the optic, the walls or the aluminum hole on the optic is very, very thin, so you get kind of a tubeless effect almost, the walls are so thin that they really don’t block any of your vision, they don’t obscure a lot around the target, so while the window size itself is not all that much larger than your standard micro red dot in effect with a very, very thin bezel on the outside, if you will, you do get a very, very nice, very unobscured sight picture.
With the optic not being as big as I thought it would be just by the pictures online. The weight is actually pretty good, coming in at only 7 ounces, which for a slightly plus-sized red dot is pretty good, it’s not gonna be the lightest red dot out there, but it’s certainly not big like some other ones that we reviewed recently.
Getting into just some of the basic controls on the optic, you might notice we actually have a front-loading battery tray that holds two AA batteries. On the side here we have our illumination controls, we have a plus button that increases the brightness and a minus button that decreases the brightness, fairly easy to understand. On the left hand side we have our windage and elevation, which are exposed nicely enough, you can use the edge of a case to adjust them or like a screwdriver or something like that. They are in half MOA increments and fortunately they are slightly exposed so they will be very difficult to actuate without intentionally doing so.
Getting into the mount, this is one of the areas that I’m not the biggest fan of. Unfortunately, it only comes in a standard absolute co-witness height, so 1.41, I believe, which is a little bit lower than most people would like to see, we’d like to see that at least a lower one-third, 1.6 or preferably, some of us, 1.75 to 2.2 inches is what we would find most comfortable.
Because this is not a standard pattern red dot, to get it higher you would need to use something like a Picatinny rail riser or 0.5-inch Picatinny riser or something like that to boost that optic height as is it works alright, but just know you’re gonna have to get your head a little bit lower than you will on some other red dots or red dots that have a more modular mounting height. The crossbolt itself is very substantial and they recommend 45-inch pounds of torque on the crossbolt, and that is what I did.
Getting into the battery life and illumination settings on the optic, this is a very simply done optic, it only has 6 brightness settings with no night vision settings.
Personally, I am 100% fine with that, this is a 100-dollar red dot that is not targeting night vision whatsoever, so instead having gimmicky night vision features it does not have them whatsoever, 6 brightness settings is more than enough, and fortunately it does get daylight bright or even a little bit more than you would need.
The reticle itself is basically identical to what you’ll find in like the AT3 RCO, so you have a 2 MOA center dot and a 65 MOA outer circle, you have hash marks on the left, right and bottom, and then the top is just a complete half circle, if you will. So, the reticle is very standard, something that you’ll see on a lot of other optics, a lot of Holosuns, very similar to Eotach, basically what they’re copying it from. It is a very fast, very usable reticle, it is not adjustable so you can’t deactivate the outer circle, it is basically just always on.
Speaking of being always on, this optic, with two AA batteries, does not have any auto-ON or auto-OFF, however, is rated for a battery life of 22, 000 hours. That’s probably at a medium brightness setting, I would warrant that will go down if you’re using a higher brightness level, but let’s say it has only about 5, 000 hours of battery life, that’s still about six months to a year if you never turn off the optic, if you forget about in the safe for months at the time, odds are the battery is still gonna work.
That being said, it is nice to have an extended battery life, however, we would prefer to see auto-On/auto-OFF technology so that that 5, 10, 20, 000 hours of battery life would be measured in years rather than hours.
Some people don’t like motion activation auto-ON/auto-OFF because it is technically another complication, another something that could go wrong theoretically. This is a constant ON optic, so if you’re looking for a constant ON optic and you’re fine with changing the batteries out every six months to a year and you just do that like clockwork, it’s gonna work just fine for you and you could turn it off to save that battery life.
Getting into the glass quality, as we’ve already talked about it, the window size is very nice, combined with the very thin bezel around it, so you have a very unobstructed image. Fortunately, the glass quality itself is also very good, with very little tint to it, so it’s a very easy, very pleasurable optic to use. There is the tiniest bit of warping or magnification if you move it around in front of your face, you will notice that it does change the image ever so slightly, though it is basically unnoticeable and 99.9% of people will never notice that sort of thing, but just note that there is the most slight distortion, warping of the image whatsoever, it’s not the most perfect no-distortion, no-magnification 1x image like an Eotech.
As I already mentioned, the reticle is basically identical to what you’ll get in the AT3 RCO. Unfortunately, the emitter and reticle is probably just the exact same one that is used in the AT3 RCO, meaning that the emitter refresh rate is tied to the illumination setting, so the higher up you go in your illumination setting the more solid, the more laser-like beam you’re going to get. Unfortunately, the lower in brightness settings you go, so if you’re off that top setting, you get a very, very noticeably flashing emitter, it is easy to notice when transitioning from target to target or if you’re just looking at it and moving it around a little bit, you will definitely tell that that emitter is flashing.
That is an issue, but fortunately, when I was outside using this optic I did have it on max brightness. Max brightness does get bright enough, though it’s not overly bright as some optics will get outside, but it is bright enough, so there’s no issues there. So, while I was using it on max brightness, the refreshing rate is pretty good, just like one step below perfect, but it is pretty good and very usable. The downside is gonna be any time where you don’t want it to be on maximum brightness, maybe you’re indoors, maybe it’s low light, something like that, you’re going to have a very, very noticeable jarring refresh rate issue on the emitter.
For me personally, that’s really one of the only downsides of the optic is that the emitter refresh rate is not quite all there, I would also like it to be a little bit taller and then if we combo that with auto-ON/auto-OFF technology, then it would basically be perfect, but for what it is, this is a 100-dollar optic or sub 100-dollar optic, has a decent reticle, has a decent battery life, good feature set, good glass, it has a very, very usable window.
When I’m actually using the optic I really like how thin the outer hole is because it doesn’t obscure basically any of your peripheral vision, it looks very good, it’s very fun, very fast to use, however, I was a little bit worried at its durability, so we did a double drop test on this optic, a very simple drop test just to make sure that - 1 - the optic doesn’t break and - 2 – the zero does not shift a gross amount, so at 100 yards we have a steel target setup, we do three rounds to confirm that it is zero on the steel target, we drop the optic on the top of the optic and get it, and I was worried that this very thin aluminum hole will break because it is very thin, however, it did just fine and held zero, then we do the second drop on the side of the optic just to make sure the optic doesn’t die, it doesn’t shift zero tremendously, and fortunately, it did not.
So, the outer hole did get scratched and scuffed up, but there was no damage to the glass or anything like that, it didn’t lose zero so the zero basically didn’t shift whatsoever and the optic didn’t die, which is one of the things that was worried about, when you get a very thin hole like that, taking a hard hit on the top of the optic from shoulder height, I was worried that the optic or the body was actually going to crush in a little bit just because the design doesn’t look all that durable, fortunately, it is at least an acceptable level of durability and the optic does hold zero fairly well.
At the end of the day, is this the best 100-dollar optic on the market?
Well, probably not, it’s probably still the SIG Romeo 5 or the Holosun 403B or something like that, which is going to give you all the features that this has, plus auto-ON, plus auto-OFF, plus a better emitter, that sort of thing, plus T1, T2 mount compatibility, so they’re more modular as well, but this is different enough and the performance is definitely there, if you’re looking at just a fun, cheap red dot for a specific gun you like constant ON, you like the reticle, you understand that it does have a poor refresh rate.
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When it comes to actually using the optic and actually shooting with it, I do prefer this with the slightly larger window and the basically bezel-less design almost, if you will, to shooting with like a 20mm micro red dot, just because they’re not difficult to use, but they are going to be a little bit more constrictive than something like this because this is something, when it actually comes to shooting the optic, is very nice, very fun, very fast, very intuitive transitioning from target to target, and with the very thin bezel basically doesn’t obscure anything.
So, I do think that it is actually a very good optic, if they came out with a Gen 2, with a slightly improved emitter, maybe they had auto-ON/auto-OFF, for a 100 bucks, 120 bucks, maybe even a 150 bucks, that would be a very competitive option in this price category.
