POSTED BY JEROMY STITES ON SEPTEMBER 25, 2017

There was a time not so long ago when quality optics and affordable optics didn't occupy the same space. You either had to settle for inexpensive and shoddily built sporting good store house brands, or relegate your entire next month's diet to packaged Ramen in order to afford a quality optic. Luckily, those days have passed. Advances in technology, design and manufacturing have expanded the realms of affordability and quality so as to overlap one another, and several really good manufacturers now lie in this region where good quality optics are actually within reach for those of us with low to midrange budgets. Within this space, the proverbial sweet spot where affordability meets quality, lies Atibal Sights.

I stumbled on Atibal Sights just over a year ago quite by accident, or rather, they stumbled on me when a local photographer had to back out of a project and suggested me in their stead. Out of that small project grew a larger relationship with Atibal Sights that saw me revisit the realm of budget friendly optics, an area where I had long ago given up on due to my frustration with the quality of the offerings of the time. To say that I was skeptical of Atibal Sights' claim of offering high quality optics for modest pricing would be an understatement, after all, I had been down this road before and had become quite accustomed to Ramen as a result. Suffice to say, I couldn't be more happy to have been wrong.

After completing the aforementioned project, the CEO of Atibal Sights graciously sent me home with a parting gift: an MCRD optic. That weekend, I set about replacing the existing and troublesome low budget optic that I had been running on one of my AK-47s with the MCRD I had been gifted earlier. I figured what the hell, it couldn't be any worse than "cookie monster" (the name I affectionately gave the existing optic due to its habit of losing zero after 20-25 rounds of shooting milsurp russian ammo, the red dot would begin to roll around the inside of the housing like the eyeballs of cookie monster). With the MCRD in place, I hauled my AKs out to the desert for a bit of fun, and to my surprise, it wasn't long before I was at 300 rounds down range with the AK and no sign of trouble from the Atibal optic. The following next few weekends saw that little MCRD hit six hundred rounds, then eight hundred, and finally one thousand rounds, all without a single hiccup or re-zero, and all on the same battery it shipped with.

Ecstatic with my success with the MCRD I had been gifted, I decided that I would replace all of the budget optics on my AKs with MCRDs. Up until this point, I hadn't looked at the retail pricing on Atibal's website, so I didn't know what to expect, after all, I was told it was priced for a moderate-to-conservative budget, but what one man considers budget pricing may not meet the expectations of another man's idea of budget pricing. Once again, I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered that the retail pricing for the MCRD was right around $30 more than I had previously paid for the budget optic it had supplanted and which had utterly failed me. That, my friends, is what you would call a no-brainer. A $30 bump for a huge boost in quality and performance? Umm, yes please. A couple clicks later on the atibalsights.com website and I had two more MCRDs on the way. A short while later I ordered an MCRD Pro, and then a 1-4x Striiker, and then an MROC and a 3-12x Nomad after that.

I now own just about every model optic that Atibal has made thus far, and I am happy to report that I have yet to have any issues with any of them. And even if I ever did, the Atibal sights are backed by a lifetime guarantee which adds even more value that continues to shrink that $30 gap down to next to nothing. All my of Atibal optics have performed flawlessly, and I couldn't be happier. As an added bonus, my blood pressure recently began returning to normal by not having to resort to Ramen meals just so I can afford quality optics.

Do yourself a favor, the next time you go to buy an optic give these Atibal's a try, they over-deliver on their modest price point, and you will enjoy your trigger time all that much more when you aren't having to fiddle with your optic to get it working the way you want it to. They work great and don't assault your wallet.