Full disclosure on the Eotach 558 is we have absolutely no affiliation, relationship or coordination with Eotech whatsoever, I have never talked to Eotech about anything. I purchased this optic with my own money last Black Friday, so I’ve had it for several months at this point. I purchased it for 450$ on sale and in fact I’ll get this out of the way right now. This is a very expensive optic, the MSRP is 790$ which is very expensive. Street price is right now I believe 680$ is the map, but if you go to gun.deals, type Eotech 558 or use the UPC that’s listed in the description, you will find a link to this optic for 480$ at EuroOptic, that is where I purchased mine last Black Friday for 450. Currently they have them for 480$ and this is about the most feature-packed Eotech on the market so you may want to check that out if you’re interested.
Let’s go ahead and get into some of the specifics on the Eotech 558. So, first off this is, of course, a holographic style of optic which means it uses a completely different technology than your standard LED based emitters. It has some pros, some cons, of course. The main con that everyone will always talk about is battery life. The battery life on the 558 is the highest rated for an Eotech optic as setting 12 which is like an indoor setting basically you want to be like 15 or 16 if you’re outdoors but basically for an indoor setting you get 2500 hours of continuous use.
Eotechs do not have auto-on, they have an 8-hour auto off so what that means, if you’re using, this is more of a professional style optic, if you know you’re going to be doing something the optic is automatically on, and, again, it has an 8-hour auto off. If you started with the plus button, if you started with the minus button I believe it’s a 4-hour auto off so it kind of depends on what you’re doing. Usually I would only start it with the plus button and it gives you 8 hours of run time.
2500 hours seems super low and let’s be more realistic and say, let’s for a round number, let’s say 1600 hours at an actual brightness level. Well, 1600 hours, 8 hours at a time is 200 uses, so that is 200 range day, that is 200 patrol days or whatever you have, so really that is a long, long use time for what the app optic is actually doing and, again, this is more of a professional optic, this is for when you know you’re gonna be doing something and if you’re using this as a night vision optic which we’ll get into a little bit later on and using the night vision settings then your battery life is essentially going to be infinite because you’re almost using no power whatsoever.
The way that they achieve that higher battery life because most Eotechs are around of 1000 hours of battery life, some are even lower than that at like 600 hours, the way that they achieve that in this optic, the 558, is with dual AA batteries, so you actually have AA battery tray up front, these ones here are just the lithium energizer batteries that I have in here currently and I have used this optic quite a bit and I am still on the first set of batteries and essentially because you get 200 uses out of this, so even if I was going to the range every other day it would take me a year and a half to go through the first set of batteries. So, the battery life while on paper seems very low, think of this more as you get 200-ish uses somewhere between 150 and maybe 250 uses out of that, so if you’re going out every day you would only be replacing your battery every six months or so.
Another nice thing about Eotech 558 is it’s very similar to the EXPS3 optics, but instead of the single CR123A sideways you get two front facing AA batteries and with that body package you basically get a lower 1/3 mount which is very nice. This is a little bit of a taller optic than the XPS series, which is the lower or the absolute and then, of course, you have the taller XPS or in this case the 558 which has the tallest mount and QD lever built in.
The mount itself is gonna be standard to every other Eotech on the market. You have a squared recoil lug on the bottom, that is your cross bolt, you torque the nut down from one side and that will adjust two different rails or however tight that you want it. You have a QD lever on the left hand side and a little detent that you needed to press to open up that lever so that when you actually click it down it actually physically clicks into position so it won’t accidentally come loose on you. This uses the same mounting system as basically every modern Eotech so in that regard it performed extremely well, obviously this is a professional, trusted optic, this is one of the probably widely regarded toughest style of the optics on the market, has a combination of things to do with being made in America, very good QC. I have almost never heard of the Eotech going down like the electronics breaking on it, most of the time you hear one of these going down it’s from something very extreme or from getting shot.
Another thing that I really like about basically all the Eotechs is they do have the aluminum shroud that actually bolts into the base mount itself so whatever sort of impacts come on to the optic like if I were to do seven drops onto concrete, it would actually take that force instead of putting that into your glass and your electronics. It takes that force and transfers it into the base of the mount itself, which is a very tough, very durable design similar to how the SIG Romeo 8T with a titanium shroud kind of copied that design philosophy. Now, there’s basically two different versions of the exact same optic, you have the 518 which is basically the exact same optic body minus the night vision settings and then you, of course, have the 558 that has every single feature possible so this one here does, of course, have night vision. You have 20 standard brightness levels, which is way more than you will ever need. It is a very, very fine gradiation in terms of illumination which is nice because that allows you to refine your brightness level to whatever environment that you’re in but realistically you probably only need like 4 or 5 if you wanted to cut that down as much as possible but having more usually isn’t that big of deal.
You also have 10 night vision settings which, again, from what I’ve seen online, currently I don’t have knobs though I am working on it, the night vision settings do work extremely well especially when paired with holographic reticle. Now, the 558 just has a standard donut of death reticle so it has 1MOA center dot and then 65MOA outer ring. The outer ring can, of course, be used as kind of a speed functionality and also an auto raging, basically a human should stand up perfectly inside of the reticle at 100 yards or half the reticle at 200 yards, so on and so forth.
The pros and cons of the holographic style reticles are fairly simple. The biggest con that we’ve already talked about is battery life. You’re not getting 50 000 hours, you’re not getting 100 000 hours of battery life like you would on LED based emitters, but you’re getting a decent amount of use time of the optic in its intended application which is definitely not for everybody and there are circumstances where I would definitely not recommend having an Eotech with such a short battery life and something that you have to physically turn on versus something that’s constant on or has an automatic on technology.
The benefits are you get a very, very precise 1MOA reticle. Now, if you stare directly at the reticle at close range it can look very fuzzy, however, when you’re outdoors in a very bright environment you can really refine that 1MOA center dot to a very, very fine, forgiving aiming point.
As far as I know Eotechs are still the only optic with exactly zero parallax and I believe they have been actually tested and proved out at exactly zero parallax or at least within the margin of error of zero parallax, which is much better than a lot of other red dots, for instance, some red dots will have really bad parallax, which is basically if you see the dot in only like one tiny corner of the window and you take a shot at something it could be off by as much as 6MOA or more with worse style of red dots. With most red dots, with more decent red dots the parallax error is not that bad, but depending on your distance and on the red dot. Some red dots do have a very large parallax shift where, depending on how you’re looking through the optic, you can get it to shoot 3, 4, 5 even 6MOA off of where you’re shooting, which, depending on your target size and distance could be the difference between hitting your target or hitting something you don’t want to hit.
With the Eotech, again, this is more of a professional style of optic and the parallax is, again, zero or as close as it physically can be to zero. I am not sure if the Vortex AMG has the same zero parallax, I have not tested them, they both look very, very good, if you just set them up on your rifle and stare at something like 100 yards away or so and move your head left-right, up or down you’re, of course, not going to be noticing any major shift whatsoever and with Eotechs it is, again, perfect.
Another thing that I personally like about the Eotech design Eotech was really the first one to be doing this as far as I know, is you get a really big square-boxy window. Most people don’t necessarily need a bigger window to increase their performance. For me personally, it’s just a preference thing and I know a lot of people prefer to have bigger windows and with the Eotech you get one of the bigger windows on the market. I believe it is actually slightly, slightly smaller than the Vortex and maybe about the same size as the SIG Romeo 8T but overall they’re all very big windows and for most people they’re going to like that.
Another nice thing about Eotech optics is that they have some of the, if not, the best glass on the market. There is virtually zero distortion or color shift of any sort. On a lot of other optics you’ll notice a blue-green tint especially around edges of the optic, on Eotech’s there is basically none, they look very, very good, there is absolutely no warping in the image whatsoever, no matter how you move it, the glass, the image is perfectly flat with no warping, magnification whatsoever, so as far as the glass quality, the optical quality goes it is basically the best on the market, maybe on par or maybe right in the same range as like Aimpoint T2, but, overall, very, very good, absolutely no complaints whatsoever.
Is it all sunshine and rainbows on the 558?
Well, of course not.
As you can probably tell this is a very chunky optic, this weights 13.8 ounces, which makes it the heaviest optic on the market for a 1X red dot. Even the SIG Romeo 8T is 13.7 ounces, I want to say, and the 558, again, with the dual battery tray is 13.8 ounces, so it is a very heavy, very chunky optic. This will actually take up a ton of real estate on certain guns so if you have a PDW and you really don’t have much space on the rail whatsoever sticking one of these guys on there is gonna be a little bit problematic even on shorter ARs like a 7.5-icnch 300 Blackout depending on what you have mounted in front and behind, slings and whatnot, can really cramp up a gun very, very quickly.
If you combo that with a magnifier like Holosun HM3x, just think about this like a basic magnifier which weights 11.7 ounces, you get a 25-ounce total package which is gonna be heavier than most LPVOs mounts on the market and it’s also very long, as you can see, this overall package, depending on how far you have the magnifier mounted back, is probably at 10 inches or so, 8 to 9 inches which is, again, going to be about the same size as a LPVO as well and if you’re putting like an Eotech magnifier behind your Eotech optic it’s gonna be more expensive than most 1:8, 1:10s even on the market depending on the exact price of the deal that you get.
Last thing that I forgot to mention earlier is we do, of course, have our windage and elevation that are on the side of the optic body, they are very nicely recessed inside of the aluminum outer hole so you’re never going to accidentally bump them and they are set up in half MOA increments which is what we would all like to see.
With all of that out of the way, personally I really like the 558, I think it is an excellent near top-tier optic for a couple niche circumstances, if you’re using a red dot only gun or a red dot and magnifier gun and you can take the extra size and weight especially if you’re trying to combo that with passive night vision aiming, I think that it can be an exceptional optic.
The downsides are gonna be, size, weight and it’s very expensive, so for some people there are gonna be a variety of other optics that are going to have a very similar level of performance, maybe not quite as nice of glass and the reticle’s not gonna be quite as good, that sort of stuff, they’re going to have more parallax error but they’re going to be much smaller, much lighter, much less expensive and give them 95 to 99% of the performance of the 558.
So, for most people they’re probably gonna pass on the 558 which is totally fine, totally understandable. This is more of a niche top-tier style optic and really if you can take the size and weight I think it’s very good, very, very good. However, again, most people can get a very similar level of performance even with a different style of Eotech like a EXPS3, is gonna have a similar level of performance, be about the same price, but cut down on size and weight, which even though it has the reduced battery life, for some people or for most people I should say, that is probably worth it.
So, at the end of the day I think the Eotech 558 is an excellent, if niche application optic.
