Holosun 510C - The Best Open Emitter Optic on The Market?
Updated
45 months ago
Good morning, everyone, this is John with gun.deals, and today we’re gonna be taking a look at the Holosun 510C.
Getting into full disclosure on the Holosun 510C, I don’t have any sort of relationship with Holosun, we did pay our own money for this optic, however, we did get the optic at a reduced price, as I do have access to dealer or wholesale pricing from a lot of different distributors. I have reviewed a lot of Holosun products in the past, personally I think that they are some of the highest value optics on the market, they’re not necessarily my favorite in every category, however, it’s pretty undeniable that they’re very hard to beat from a performance to dollar ratio, and the 510C was actually no different. The 510C is one of the last of their optics that I haven’t personally tested out, but a lot of you guys seem to like it quite a bit, and for good reason.
So, getting into some of the specifics of the optic, as you can tell this a bit of a larger body design. It is an open emitter, quite interesting, which can introduce a few problems that we’ll get into that a little bit later on. The optic itself only weights about 6 ounces, which for an optic of this size is quite nice, most other obviously fully enclosed red dots of this size are gonna start around 9, 10 ounces, and then go all the way up to like 14 or 15 ounces in some cases for the bigger style of optic. So, coming in with a very large window, at about 6 ounces, is not bad whatsoever.
The body itself is made out of 6061 T6 aluminum, however, according to their website, the shroud over top that protects the rest of the glass and some of the internals as well is actually titanium, which is very good, it’s a very strong material obviously, protecting the housing and the glass from direct impact, and titanium is a very strong material choice.
On top of that, the base mount, the optic body and the shroud are all designed and integrated fairly well, so, for instance, how most shrouds work on most other optics like Eotech, SIG Romeo 8T, so on and so forth, most of the time the shroud bolts directly into the body itself so a lot of that pressure from impact is then transferred into the screws and therefore into the base of the mount itself.
What Holosun did on the 510C is the shroud itself is actually supported by the base mount, so it actually has a hard stop, so instead of just being supported on the screw, it actually has a hard stop underneath the shroud itself, then that transfers that force into the base of the mount rather than the glass or te internals. So, as far as the shroud design goes, 1-it’s titanium, which is a very strong material to begin with, on top of that, it’s bolted to the optic body and supported by the optic body itself, which is just a very good design.
The mount itself is a QD lever design, which is not necessarily my favorite, I don’t think it’s necessarily needed, however, in testing it did do fairly well, the one thing that it is missing on the bottom of the optic is it does not have any sort of integrated recoil lug, so it’s returned to zero like right now, after taking it off, I probably need to re-zero the optic because it doesn’t have any sort of integrated recoil lug that will allow it to hold zero better, but also return to zero, gives it a larger contact surface on your upper receiver, and is in general a little bit more preferable to see.
In terms of controls on the optic body itself, we have plus and minus buttons on the side, the very nice, rubberized, tactile, very easy to use, adjusting your brightness. On this specific optic you have 12 brightness settings, you have 2 night vision settings and 10 daylight settings. It gets very dim and it gets very, very bright, brighter than you will probably ever need.
On top of that, you have windage and elevation that are recessed into the body that you can adjust with certain casing or like a small flat head screwdriver, they’re not necessarily the easiest or nicest things to adjust, but they’re set-and-forget and, as we’ll go into later on, you really don’t need to adjust them even if they encounter a harsh impact.
On the other side of the optic body we have our 2032 battery tray. The battery tray itself is held in place by two bolts, meaning that if the battery ever went down and you needed to switch it out in a hurry, you got to pull out a tool, take out two screws, swap out you battery, put it back in pace, screw it back down into place, so it’s a little bit more obnoxious of a process than other optics that either have a QD sort of style battery tray like, I believe, the 512C has a QD battery tray, which makes it obviously a little bit faster to swap out that battery should you need to, or other optics where it’s more easy to swap out the batteries in a hurry.
With some of the other features that this optic has, the odds of that being a big deal are very slim, so the battery life on the optic, with a single 2032, is rated at 50 000 hours at setting 6. More realistically, at settings 8-11, if you will, you’re probably getting somewhere between 5 and 25 000 hours of battery life because you have a multiple reticle system in here, which we’ll talk about later on, but that is also compounded with auto-ON/auto-OFF technology, meaning that if you leave it alone for a certain amount of time it will automatically turn off, and if you pick it up, move it around just a little bit, it will turn back on, meaning that you get somewhere between 5 and 20 000 hours of use out of the optic, not just it sitting around.
So, theoretically, the battery life on this optic is, however, long, that 2032 can actually hold charge. On top of that, it does have the solar failsafe unit built inside of the optic, which does work. So, in a pinch, even of the battery did die and you were outside, it would still provide you a mostly usable reticle.
Getting into the reticles themselves, this does use a fairly standard 2 MOA central dot and 65 MOA outer circle, also with this optic you can cycle between them, so you can do just the dot or just the 65 MOA circle, for some reason, I don’t know why you would ever want a 65 MOA circle as a reticle, you can do it, however, or you can use both.
99% of the time that I’m using this optic I have the 2 MOA dot and 65 MOA circle, for me personally, I like the circle, however, if you don’t need it you can disable it and that will probably extend your battery life out quite a bit.
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At 400 yards I was basically referencing the 2 MOA dot just somewhere off in the background and trying to be as consistent as possible with my point of aim because there is no BDC in this optic, which would make it a little bit more usable, but it is still usable in a pinch.
Getting into the glass quality itself, this, like most of Holosun’s optics, does have a very noticeable blue notch filter. It’s not the biggest deal in the world, it’s really not all that noticeable unless you’re really looking for it. Where it will come into play is when you have it set up with a magnifier and then a very green background because it’s kind of a blue-green notch filter.
So, it is not the highest glass quality, not the most pleasant thing to use with a magnifier because a magnifier is just gonna magnify whatever glass you have in front of it, so if you have a bad glass in front and then you magnify it, not gonna have a great time, and it’s not that the glass is bad, the glass clarity, the quality of the 1x image is very good, it’s very flat, very natural looking, there’s not a lot of curving or warping to it like you can find on other red dots. However, it is just a very blue notch filter that is noticeable to some people, it might be slightly annoying, to me it wasn’t really, it’s just something worth pointing out.
In terms of performance, this red dot basically does everything that I want it to do, I personally do like a bigger window size and you do get a very nice window on here. The glass quality is decent, the image is very flat, so with that 2 MOA dot/65 MOA circle, which is how I prefer to run it, up close inside of 100 yards, I have absolutely no complaints whatsoever.
On extended distances, now not necessarily on this 10.5-inch 7.62x39, but like on a 5.56, I would like to see a BDC like you can get on some of the SIG red dots, like 5, 9 , 15 MOA holds, for 4, 5, 600 yards. Not even that those are super ideal for those distances, but it does give a little bit more versatility to the optic. As it stands, though, inside of 300-ish yards, 3-400-ish yards, I really don’t have anything to complain about the optic in terms of its performance.
I am not personally a huge fan of open emitter optics, especially really big open emitter style optics on rifles. I know that the one complaint that most people have is that if something gets in here and blocks the emitter, then the optic is done basically, at that point you need to stop whatever you’re doing, clean it out and then you can go back to using the reticle again.
The counter to that is that it really never happens, however, I live in Washington State where it rains six months out of the year, and if we’re lucky we get a month of snow, and without fail every year I will be shooting with an open emitter handgun, and it will go down either due to rain or snow or something else, and it will happen only a couple of times a year, but it still does happen.
So, personally, while I do really like the performance of this optic, I’m not entirely sold on open emitter big style red dots on a rifle. For competition, home defense, just plinking fun, all that sort of stuff, awesome, however, for a super serious application it’s not necessarily something that I would like, especially if I’m only sacrificing a couple ounces to get a fully enclosed red dot. So, that’s my personal take on it, it’s not a deal breaker, and for certain amount of people it won’t matter at all, but it is something that I am personally a little bit wary of.
Getting into the durability of the optic, the optic is designed very well, so I did want to do a little bit of a drop test on it and see if it would retain an acceptable level of zero, so we went ahead, we did a drop on the top of the optic. The shroud itself Is titanium and it’s also supported by the base of the optic, which is a very good design choice by them on that part, and fortunately, the optic performed as expected.
So, I did a 3-round control group at 100 yards on a 10x16 steel target, not a small target, not a huge target either, at 100 yards, did a shoulder height drop, loaded up another 3 rounds, did another 3 rounds at 100 yards, still performing excellently, did a second shoulder height drop onto dirt and rocks, and again we had no issues with the optic whatsoever in terms of it holding and acceptable level of zero, it might have shifted 1 MOA here or there, but not enough to make you miss a reduced-sized target at 100 yards, which for me is perfectly fine.
Anytime you drop your optic or it experienced a sharp impact because sharp impacts do happen, it’s not necessarily a drop, you could trip and fall, it could be something else, whatever else that it could be, anytime your optic experiences a sharp impact it’s always a good idea to check your zero anyways, and the 520C, at least in my testing, did hold an acceptable level of zero, and the optic itself didn’t break either, the shroud is fine, the glass is fine, still retains full functionality of all its controls, so all good there.
At the end of the day, I do think that the 510C is a great performing optics, especially for the money, I think these can be found for 250 bucks, sometimes maybe a little bit less. I think they are a little bit cheaper in general than the 512C, which is basically just the exact same optic, but fully enclosed, a little bit bigger, heavier as well, but the 510C, a lot of people like it, and I can definitely see why, as it performed, I really don’t have anything to complain about in terms of its speed, precision, even our to a little bit of distance.
They also make a riser plate for the 510C, as I believe its standard height is a 1.43 and with a riser plate installed, which is only like 20 bucks, you can get it up to a 1.63, which is a lower one-third, which for more people will be a little bit more comfy or you can always just add in a half inch ammo or a half inch Picatinny riser and that will get you up to around that 2-inch height, which for most people is kind of that Gucci tall tier that everyone likes to see.
For me personally, the only thing that I wouldn’t use this optic for is like a super hard use duty upper receiver that’s going to get used and abused, especially in all seasons, just because I’m not completely sold on an open emitter big red dot on a rifle, especially when I can get basically the exact same red dot, but with a closed emitter design. I see a lot of people run these in competitions, I see a lot of people using them as home defense, truck guns and a litany of other use cases, and they perform very well, it’s a very liked optic, and it has a lot of things going for it, I really can’t complain about the performance whatsoever, it held up well in durability, speed, accuracy, everything that you would want, zero retention, and it doesn’t cost that much money either.
So, at the end of the day, do I think that the Holosun 510C is actually a very good dot?
Yes, I do!
So, at the end of the day, it’s not going to be perfect for everyone or everything, but I do think it is an exceptional value, and if you’re looking at an optic like this, with this sort of feature set, it is something you should take a look at.
