Sig Romeo 8T - The Best Duty Red Dot?

Updated 23 months ago

Good morning everyone, hope you’re all having a wonderful day today. Today we’re gonna be talking about SIG Romeo 8T.


Full disclosure on the SIG Romeo 8T is that I paid my own money for this, 100% my own money for this. They did not send this out for the review. I have no communication and no relationship with SIG whatsoever. The only time I have ever dealt with SIG is when I thought I had killed one of my Romeo 5s, that ended up being my issue, but I have talked to their customer service one time and that is the extent or my relationship with SIG. I have reviewed a lot of SIG’s products, I tend to like their optics, I tend to not like their generation 1 guns, but I did pay my own money for it and I have had exactly zero communication to or from SIG about this review. With all that out of the way, let’s go ahead and get into some of the specifics on the SIG Romeo 8T.

So, for those of you who don’t know the 8T is basically the top of the line, the toughest, the tankiest, the most expensive red dot that SIG makes and for good reason. The 8 line-up is their big EOTECH slash AMG-sized optic with a 30mm window, it’s a big boxy window that I really like, the glass quality is very good and the 8T line-up, I believe the 8 and 4H line-up as well, those are both assembled in the USA so you get a lot better quality control, you got a lot better QA, QC, that sort of thing and so you have a much higher chance of receiving an optic that performs as it should versus items that are assembled overseas.

Sig Romeo8T Red Dot Sight

Size and Weight

Getting into the size and weight on the SIG Romeo 8T, this is going to be the most controversial part for sure and some people are going to love it and some people are going to hate it. So, this optic is nearly 4 inches long, 2.5 inches tall and over 2 inches wide. It comes in at a weight of 13.7 ounces, which I believe is the heaviest red dot on the market. I could be wrong about that, there’s probably some niche old style red dot that’s just a chunk of steel and aluminum, that’s a little bit heavier, but as far as I know of and have tested and reviewed this is the heaviest red dot on the market so then the question is what are we actually getting with all of that additional size and weight. Well, the first thing that you’re getting, the most obvious thing that you’re getting is a very, very large 38mm window. It is very large, it is very nice, if you like big windows and big boxy red dots you are absolutely going to love the window on the Romeo 8T.

Sig Romeo8T Red Dot Window

Material

On top of that, you’re getting a main body that is made out of 7075 T6 aluminum, which is approximately twice as strong as 6062 which most other micro-style and even large-style red dots are made out of, they’re made out of 6061 but the Romeo 8T, the base of the optic or the main body of the optic is made out of 7075 which is already quite a bit stronger. On top of that, the 8t also comes with a titanium shroud that is hooked into the base of the optic much like how EOTECHs have an aluminum shroud based into the bottom of their optics. It’s a very similar concept on the Romeo 8T ,however, in this case it is, of course, titanium. Titanium is heavier than aluminum, but on top of its being heavier it also has much higher strength/weight ratio, so while it is slightly heavier, I believe 20 to 30 percent heavier, given the specific material composition, of course, but it’s also far stronger which is why in a lot of applications it is very advantageous to have titanium versus aluminum.

Battery

The Romeo 8t is also powered by a single CR123A battery versus a standard 2032 battery like a lot of other optics are powered by. The advantage of that additional size and battery is you get a rated battery life of 100 000 hours. This is a SIG Sauer optic which means that it has MOTAC, it’s motion activation. That means while this optic is in rest it is completely of, meaning that that 100 000 hours of battery life, let’s say in real world circumstances with higher brightness levels than the medium setting which it’s rated for, let’s say it’s 30 to 40 000 hours of battery life, that’s actually 30 to 40 000 hours of use time, not overall battery life. The battery on the Romeo 8T will last as long as that battery can actually hold the charge which is probably about 5 to 15 years, again depending on the manufacturer of the battery.

Sig Romeo8T on the Rifle Shooting

Another area where some weight is added is in the actual base of the mount itself so we have a ginormous steel cross-bolt with a hex head that is rated for 96 inch pounds or 8 foot pounds. That is the highest torque rating on amount that I know of in a red dot that is higher than any other red dot that I have seen, that is higher than 99% of scope mounts on the market and that’s because they’re using an incredibly strong large substantially size with a half inch head cross-bolt that allows you to get an insane amount of torque on your rail. On top of that, it also uses a much larger than average steel locking block, that means that not only do you have that insane clamping pressure but you get it over a much larger surface area. On top of that, on the mount not only is the cross-bolt squared off which means that it and of itself acts like a recoil lug, you also get two additional recoil lugs on the bottom, which in effect creates more contact area between your optic and your upper receiver allowing it again to have a more solid lock up during recoil with higher caliber weapons and another side benefit of that is that it provides a more consistent return to zero since when you push this down and push it forward you have three contact surfaces that should be mating up the same every single time.

Sig Romeo 8T for Sale

When it comes to strength versus weight in an optic design you can tell that SIG put all 10 of their attribute points in the strength column. When it comes to the titanium shroud itself, you can see that it is screwed into both sides via three set screws, now remember, the optic body itself is made of 7075 which is already a very strong material choice and then on top of that it has this titanium shroud.

The titanium shroud mostly protects the front and the rear parts of your optic which is, of course, where the lenses are actually housed and then in the middle it has this cutout area, though it will still protect from 90% of like if you’re dropping it on its top like 10 times almost all of that force is gonna be transferred into the base of the optic not into the top of the housing that, of course, has all of your glass and other important stuff in there that you probably don’t want to be taking impacts. Not only that, it’s protect it front and sides, but it is also protrudes in front of the glass and behind the glass so if you’re slamming this into a door or a car door, house door, something else like that, any sort of hard object unless it was a very pointy thing that could stick through and actually poke the glass itself is going to be protected from just about every angle.

Sig Romeo8T Review

As far as ergonomics go on the optic itself, we do, of course, have our door battery here on the side for the side loading CR123A, you can hand tighten it you can hand loosen it. If it gets too tight it has a little cutouts for like a edge of a case rim or something so you can loosen it if it does become stuck or just too tight, over time of course. Me personally, throw in the highest battery you can and forget about it because it has that exceptional battery life.

We, of course, have our half inch hex head, which, of course, also has little cutouts for it if you don’t happen to have a half inch socket on you, you can a case rim or something to try and get it off because, again, if you have this torque down to spec 96 inch pounds is an exceptional amount of force on an optic.

Swapping over to the other side, we have two rubberized buttons, one goes up one goes down, very simple. If you hold both of them you will cycle through the reticle options which we will talk about a little bit later on. I’m going to critique SIG here a little bit because these buttons are not very tactile and they’re very, very mushy, they are on the side which is nice so if you’re running this with a magnifier like I was most of the time you don’t have to fiddle with the back end if you had buttons in the back.

Those are really only two actual controls on it. We, of course, have our windage and elevation in the top. The elevation one is a little bit obnoxious to get to, this is another little nitpick so I used a screwdriver for this, but on the windage you can use the edge of a case rim or something like that, but the one on top, because it also has this plastic shroud with the flip up caps, it’s a little bit more difficult to get to.

You can remove both of those plastic flip up caps, they do come built in, you can remove them if you want to, but for me personally, it kind of goes with the optic design and in Washington, as you’ll probably see in the intro and some of the other footage I’m rolling in here, not only was it snowing in the middle of April but we were also absolutely pelted by hail so I was using these flip caps to protect the optic and make sure that I could still see through it when I actually needed to use the optic, flip them up and you’re good to go.

Reticle Design and Emitter

Let’s go ahead and talk about the reticle design because they kind of go hand in hand. The reticle has four different options. The base reticle is 2MOA dot and then you can do a 2MOA dot with a 65 MOA circle just like an EOTECH. That is how I would run it most of the time, however if you prefer a finer, more precise dot just use the 2MOA dot and you will be good to go.

Sig Romeo8T Red Dot Optic

Then you also have an option for a BDC. Now, they did the BDC correctly in my opinion, it is basically MOA holds so the second dot is a 5MOA drop, the third dot is 9MOA drop and the fourth dot is a 15MOA drop. That is very close to, depending on your gun ammunition is gonna change, but that is very close to a 16-inch 5.56 shooting 62 grain M855. The 5MOA drop is going to be 400 yards, the 9MOA drop is going to be 500 yards and the 15MOA drop is going to be 600 yards. Those are rough estimates and depending on your barrel length and what exact type of ammunition you’re shooting, those are going to vary drastically but because they give you the actual MOA you can just through those out to whatever caliber that you’re using so, for instance on this 10-3 that… Sorry, not 10-3, this is a 10-5, this is my CQB pro upper that I sell on ‘Focus Shooting LLC’ but on this upper receiver 5MOA is more like 350 yards depending on how I zero the gun, if I zero it at 50 or 100 and then, of course, the 9 and the 15 are going to be like 440 like 530 respectively so it doesn’t quite line up perfectly but again because you know the actual MOA holds it is very easy to figure out where those are and then use them as reference points, if you know you need to be 15 MOA or, let’s say, 25 MOA or 2o MOA you can use your 15 MOA dot and then hold high and you should be pretty darn close though that is a very, very long range shoot with most calibers but again, if you use all of them together it can be busy because, of course, the fourth reticle option is all of them so you get your 2MOA dot, your 3BDC holds and then your 65 Moa outer circle. You can run it like that all of the time, it is going to use more battery that otherwise, right, because it just has to power of the emitter.

Sig Romeo8T Red Dot Sight Optic

My personal opinion and the way that I ran the optic is 99 some of the time inside of 300 I would only use the 2MOA dots and 65 MOA outer circle. If you don’t like the outer circle get rid of it, if you want the BDC and you know you’re gonna be taking longer range shots go ahead and activate that and hen make a choice whether you just want the BDC or whether you also want the 65 MOA outer circle. If I knew I was gonna be shooting at say 5 or 600 yards or anywhere really in between 3 and 500 yards I would only have the 2MOA dot and the BDC because I wouldn’t really need the 65 MOA circle it would just be cluttering up my screen a little bit.

Talking about the emitter itself, it has a very, very good refresh rate, I never noticed any flickering any fading in and out when you’re transitioning very quickly and moving it right about, it has a very, very good refresh rate. On top of that, if you cycle it to just the BDC or just the 2MOA dot it is very crisp and very precise for a red dot emitter which is something that I do like and something that is necessary when you’re putting in a BDC, for instance, if you have a BDC with those four dots and they all look terrible and kind of meld together you’re not gonna have a good time using those as reference points or as an actual BDC.

Another nice thing about the emitter on the Romeo 8T is that it gets exceptionally bright, even in snowy conditions, whiteout conditions, it will get brighter than you ever need unless you’re doing missions on the surface of the sun so the emitter is exceptionally bright, it’s still crisp enough, it’s still definitely usable, it is still, you know, dot-size, it’s not as precise as and etched reticle but for a red dot emitter it looks very, very good.

Glass

Talking about the glass on the Romeo 8T for a minute, the glass quality is very good, it’s a very natural looking image, there’s very, very little warping, if you look at it from like a crazy weird angle you can kind of get a tiny bit of a magnification effect but when you’re actually behind the glass it is a perfectly flat, very, very nice image. It does have the tiniest of green-blue tint to it, but in every lighting condition that I was viewing it in whether that was under white lights or just out on the range, in shade, all sorts of different varied lighting conditions it looked very, very good.

Sig Romeo8T Red Dot Sight Glass

This does, of course, have night vision settings. I have not tested the night vision settings so I cannot speak to whether or not they’re good or the glass is good enough for passive aiming. I will say that the glass is really good, not quite as good as my EOTECH glass and I would say on par with the AMG, the AMG does have a slight blue-green tint, again, I’m not sure about their light transmission in like total dark passive aiming NVGs but just for normal daytime white light shooting conditions the glass is very, very good.

Another thing that might just have to do with the emitter, the coating on the lenses and the optic design in general is that this optic has exactly zero glare in any lighting scenario that I can put it in, as opposed to a lot of cheaper Holosun optics and some SIG Romeo 5s and such that will have some glare in certain circumstances, really bad glare in the case of the Holosun’s, but this optic has exactly zero glare in any lighting scenario that I could put it in.

So, with all that being said, why isn’t the SIG Romeo 8T the most popular duty optic on the market?

Sig Romeo8T Red Dot Sight on the Rifle

And that probably has to do with a combination of things. The first thing is that it’s very expensive. The SIG Romeo 8T in the FT version I believe the minimum advertiser price is like 700$ and the MSRP is like 900$. Now, that’s on par with a lot of EOTECHs like your EXPS3s and so on so forth are gonna be around that same price point, however, those are completely made in the USA optics versus assembled in the USA optics even though I do think that this does have some advantages in terms of the mount and titanium shroud versus an aluminum shroud. The glass quality is not quite on par with EOTECH. The battery life and reticle design in my opinion, especially, because you can switch back and forth to whatever you want, is exceptional. The glass quality, though not quite on the level of EOTECH so for professional passive aiming, that sort of things, it’s not going to be quite as advantageous as an EOTECH will for again about the same price and then the last kind of contributing factor to its lack of popularity is that it is, again, the heaviest optic on the market as far as I’m aware for a red dot.

Sig Romeo8T Red Dot Sight on the Rifle Shooting

So, this one here, again, with titanium shroud comes in at 13.7 ounces versus 12.3 ounces I believe on the EOTECH 5.58, this is the lower 1-third with night vision and the extended battery tray so this one here is about the heaviest EOTECH on the market, and then the AMG UH-1, this one here is 11.7 ounces, this one here is also about the same in terms of actual street price. The street price on the black versions I’ve seen for around 600$ mark and on sale they can probably go a little bit lower than that, the tan versions usually stick it around 660 or so on the actual retail side of things. If the 8T was probably 100 or 20 dollars cheaper and it kind of slotted underneath like EOTECH’s and Vortex AMGs in terms of price it was actually undercutting them just a little bit, I think you would see a lot of people picking them up and trying them out and I think that it would be much better regarded than it currently is, People do really like this optic, there are a lot of people that use it, that love it, and other people that kind of pass it by as, you know, because a lot of the components are made overseas, it is assembled in the US but it is not entirely made in the US and they’re charging a very, very high price for it.

In my personal opinion, it definitely has the features to back it up. The only area where I would say it would be lacking is, of course, the fact that it is one heavier but also that the glass quality is not quite to the level of EOTECH and again they’re around the same price so if you’re already a professional, you know, with NVGs and whatever else that you’re using you’re probably just going to stick with the tried and true EOTECH, again, especially considering they’re the same cost but putting all that off to the side for the moment I do think the Romeo 8T is an excellent optic, I do think it’s expensive but I do think it has a lot of features to back it up, I think if you’re looking for a red dot only gun and you can take the size and weight, I think that it is an excellent option if not one of the best options if you don’t care about size, weight and price. Now, that’s already going to make it a very niche optic but for me personally, again, I paid my own money for this and I am very happy with its performance. Now, again, if I can get this 3 ounces lighter and 150 buck cheaper I would be even happier with it and those are going to be the main drawbacks.