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Holosun HM3x - The Best Budget 3x Magnifier
Updated
25 months ago
Hallo everyone, hope you’re all having a wonderful day today. Today we’re gonna be taking a look at the Holosun HM3x, this is, of course, their 3x magnifier.
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Full disclosure on the Holosun HM3x is that we have no relationship or affiliation with Holosun for this review. I actually personally purchased this optic quite some time ago. I have a review of this optic on my personal channel and there is, again, no affiliation or relationship with Holosun for this review whatsoever and we paid full retail price for this which I believe at the time I paid 199$ for it and that’s kind of still worth around 199 to like 220$ is where you can usually find it and if it goes on sale, maybe a 180 bucks.
Getting into specifics on the Holosun HM3x, we, of course, have the aluminum body 3x magnifier, I believe the aluminum is 6061 T6, we have a rear diopter at the end to adjusting the reticle to your eyes of just making the image look as natural as possible and we also have windage and elevation for centering whatever reticle you’re using in the glass. It doesn’t really affect of zero, it might introduce a little bit of parallax, but usually that is just for centering the reticle within the window. The body itself is three and a half inches long and about two and a half inches tall depending on a riser mount.
Getting into the mount itself on the Holosun HM3x, they actually did a really good job with a base mount itself, thus you can see on there it has two squared-off recoil lugs that work to enhance its locking capability to the upper receiver by creating additional contact surface also those butt up against the Picatinny on the top of your upper receiver which also has a very nice lock up forward and back. You’re not really too concern with that on a magnifier, but it is a nice thing to see.
The Holosun HM3x uses a buttonless mount design. The one thing that we’re gonna knock this for is that the mount design is a little weak and it’s detent system. In the magnifier is pushed off of center. There is actually a little bit of wobble between the magnifier and the mount. You can definitely notice it in slow-mo footage, but when the magnifier is in line the mount is a lot more solid and there really isn’t any of that obnoxious wobble. I have that question asked all the time, but it is reversible. You simply have two set screws on the bottom of the magnifier itself and then you would just simply unscrew those, flip the magnifier to get it to flip to the right or to the left depending on how you want it to run it. There’s also a riser that comes with the HM3x so I believe the standard height mount is a 1.435 which is a standard absolute co-witness and then it has a 0.2-inch riser plate which will, of course, take that to 1.635 or a lower one third co-witness so basically it will adjust to most red dots on the market or at least get very close depending on your red dot that you’re using. I’ve used this with a bunch of different dots without issue, though if you’re using a very tall mount you probably won’t be able to get it to line up perfectly unless you find some sort of aftermarket solution.
The problem with this mount design is that unfortunately it is not compatible, from what I’ve seen in red, with other mounts on the market while it does use a two bolt mounting system on the bottom they’re much closer on like the Trijicon and even the Primary Arms and the Vortex-styled magnifiers, so it’s not compatible unless you were able to configure some sort of adapter plate in between them, so as of right now I believe that the amount that it comes with is what you’re stuck with so if the mount is too big of a downside for you because it’s not quite as strong, not quite as secure as other mounts on the market then this is gonna be a big downside of the optic.
The mount itself uses this little QD lever here to actually lock down to your upper receiver or to your rail, whatever you’re putting it on and it actually gets locked in place. We have a little detent on the back you have to push down and then actually unlock it so it’s never gonna come off on its own, which with the QD lever you definitely want something locking that in place, otherwise over time, with certain recoils they can just come off on their own and I have had that happen on worse cheaper QD levers. To tighten it down you simply tighten down the actual bolt itself on the other side which is a very substantially sized crossbolt, so as far as how it mounts to the rail is very good. The mount itself, as I mentioned, when it’s in that off position, there’s a little bit of wobble there, so in slow-mo you can see it moving back and forth. When it’s in the on position or in line with your red dot there’s no wobble at all.
It’s not the most secure, most snappy mount like on Vortex or even the Primary Arms that has a very, very definitive snap in a position, but it is decent in the inline position, it’s just part of probably the worst part of the optic overall and something that for some people is gonna be a little bit obnoxious that it kind of moves when it’s off.
As you can tell this is a longer body magnifier, this is definitely not a micro magnifier. Holosun actually did recently come out with a micro version of this that has basically the exact same specs, I believe it’s an ounce lighter and about an inch shorter, but overall it has the exact same field of view and eye relief which we’ll get into a little bit later on.
The weight on the Holosun HM3x is at 11 ounces, which is a little heavy for a magnifier. Honestly, I did not think it was that heavy, but when I looked at the spec sheets claims it’s like 11 and a half ounces, which is fairly heavy, so if you’re using this with like a standard micro T1, T2 optic it’s gonna be somewhere in the range of like 15 to like 17, 18 ounces depending on the mounts that you’re using, so overall it’s definitely not a small or lightweight magnifier but it does do some things very well especially for its money.
The first thing that it does fairly well is it has a fairly forgiving eye relief. The eye relief is coated at 2.75 inches, which you think is very short but because it has a longer optic body, you don’t need to set it all the way back on your rail so if you’re using backup iron sights you can actually push this forward a little bit and still have backup iron sights on your AR-15 if you want it.
The shorter version of this, like I mentioned, the Holosun HM3x micro or whatever they’re calling it, has the exact same eye relief, but the body is an inch shorter, which in effect gives you a shorter mechanical eye relief so this has a shorter body and a decent-ish eye relief for a 3x magnifier meaning that it actually is fairly forgiving on long guns if you’re using a longer guns if you’re using longer stock even a rifle link stock you can still make the magnifier work without having to crane your head too far forward.
Another thing is that it has a very decent field of view. The field of view is 37 feet at 100 yards, which, if you extrapolate that to its 1x performance, like we would on a LPVO, that’s around 111 feet, which is actually very good, that is definitely in the very good category for field of view, that means that when you actually need to use it you get more of that magnified image which is something that I personally like. Combined with the 2.5 inches or 2.75 inches of eye relief plus a fairly tight eye box, not the worst eye box out there, but it is fairly tight, means that you get an optic that’s fairly forgiving in terms of its eye relief and also gives you a very good field of view when you’re looking through the optic.
The glass architecture in here is fairly simple even though, yes, this is an overseas made optic that costs around 200$. The glass quality is actually very good. You would get a very natural looking image, a very flat image. There is some distortion at the edges, you get a little bit of this like color shift like browning towards the edges, but, overall, the clarity, the light transmission is fairly decent for this category, so you combine that with a decent eye relief and a pretty good, very good field of view and you get a magnifier that’s very easy to use.
For the money this is one of the best magnifiers on the market, it’s gonna compete directly with the Vortex 3x magnifiers, I believe I actually picked up their Vortex 3x micro for the same price that I picked up this one for 199$. The Vortex has the same eye relief, the same field of view, but it has a shorter body, it does have a better mounting system, but a much shorter body, meaning that it’s a little bit less useable on longer guns because you are going to need to either set it way further back on your rail or crane your head much further forward which, of course, can be a little bit uncomfortable.
Overall, the magnifier does a really good job at what it’s supposed to, it’s supposed to give you a decent magnified image, has a decent eye relief, a very good field of view so when you’re actually using it, it is very nice, it’s very easy, it’s non-distracting depending on what optic you’re using it with will determine how good the glass is. Some dots have very poor glass but here on the SIG Romeo 8T the glass is fairly different, there is a little bit of a blue tint to it for sure and that is magnified when you’re using a magnifier so if you’re using a magnifier and you have like a really bad blue tint it’s gonna be even harder to use it versus if you had even nicer glass in the back and then even nicer glass up front, like if I put on my Eotech on here, it would look even better, of course, but, again, the magnifier does do a good job at what it’s supposed to do, of course, giving you that extra magnification, that little bit of precision if you will, that extra positive ID depending on if you’re trying to tell what you’re shooting at.
It is very important for most guns to have some ability to provide extra magnifications, not every gun in every situation but for most people a magnifier is going to be a good option on their gun and if you’re on a very tight budget you really only got a couple options, you got the Primary Arms 3x which also has basically the same specs. The Primary Arms magnifier is actually a little bit bigger. When we get into the micros, of course, the micros are much smaller and going to have that shorter eye relief, so really, it comes down to what you need to use the magnifier for, are you using it on a long gun, are you using it on a PDW or something very small with a very short stock that the eye relief isn’t really all that important, these are gonna be things that you’re gonna need to consider.
For me the main downsides of the Holosun HM3x are the fact that the mount is a little bit sub-optimal, it definitely has some wobble in the off position, not in the on position but in the off position it does have some wobble and the mount itself is not as firm, it’s not as confidence-inducing as other mounts on the market and it, of course, is almost 12 ounces which when you combine it with q 13.7 ounces red dot means you have a setup heavier than 1:8s or 1:6 LPVOs with a mount, so if you are on a budget and you can take a little bit of extra weight and size and you can live with the mediocre mount then I think this is going to be a very good option but it’s gonna depend on what you need it for.So, there are a lot of good options in this price category and, again, it’s really gonna come down to what you need, what gun is it actually going on.
The advantage of having a very nice QD lever on the Holosun set HM3x is that you can put it on just about every gun on the market. I’ve used it for quite a long time, you’ve seen me run it on a probably a dozen different guns if you’ve watched my personal channel at all, and it is just a very good magnifier for what it does, it has decent glass, decent eye relief, very good field of view, so at its main job of magnification it does a pretty good job at that, it does have some tertiary drawbacks, it’s a little bit heavier, the mount is a little bit sub-par for the genre but overall it’s still a very decent magnifier.
