Reviews / Optics & Sights

ATN X-Sight 5 3-15x LRF Full Review — Digital Mastery?

The Verdict

Once you get it dialed in, it's almost scary how much thinking this scope does for you.

The X-Sight 5 is a day/night digital scope, laser rangefinder, ballistic calculator, and video recorder in one package — and once it's set up, it takes the thinking out of shooting. We were putting shots under an MOA at almost 400 yards with 22 ARC. The trade-offs are real: there's a legit learning curve if you've only ever run analog glass, and the digitized picture isn't Japanese-glass crystal. But at $1,000-1,500 depending on sales, it does things no traditional scope can do.

/The Rundown

This one's a first for the channel and maybe a first for you: the ATN X-Sight 5, the 3-15 version with the LRF — laser rangefinder — included. Day and night vision, ballistic calculator, you name it, this thing's got it. In full transparency, ATN sent it out for us to take a look at, and I'm super stoked they did. It comes with a set of sturdy-looking scope mounts, and we mounted it up and loaded our ballistics before heading out, because it was about 100 degrees and I wasn't sitting in that heat fiddling with menus.

The setup is smarter than you'd expect. Your phone connects to the scope over Wi-Fi, and you can load and change all your ballistic data through the app — or, if you're out hunting without your phone, everything can be changed straight through the viewfinder. There are about eight or nine preloaded reticles, and here's the badass part: you can build your own custom reticle in the app. We ran a mil-drop reticle for this shoot.

The recording features are wild. Drop in an SD card and it'll record video of everything you're seeing. Better yet, there's a recoil-activated system: pull the trigger, and it automatically backs up ten seconds and records your entire shot. If you're hunting and want video of your kill without thinking about it, that's the feature.

Zeroing is where this thing embarrasses traditional scopes. It has a one-shot zero: put your crosshairs on the target, fire, then move the reticle to where the hole actually is — and it digitally zeros the rifle. No five, six, seven, eight shots walking it in. I did it three times just to be sure, but one shot genuinely does it. You can also set up multiple profiles — my 22 ARC data lives in one, but I could build profiles for a 308 or an AR-10, swap the scope between guns, confirm with one shot, and be good to go. That's almost invaluable.

Results: shooting the Ruger American Predator in 22 ARC — funky-looking little 22-caliber projectile on a fat case — we put two shots under one MOA and another pair right at about one MOA from almost 400 yards, ranged with the built-in LRF. Every one of those would have been a kill shot on any animal we'd be going after.

Now the honest part. If you're an idiot like me, this thing is a little tough to figure out. I watched other YouTube videos and read the manual three or four times. If all you've ever done is analog scopes — take a few shots, click your turrets — this will bend your brain at first. And the picture is a digitized image; you're not getting that crystal-clear Japanese-glass clarity out of it. But once it's dialed, between the rangefinder, the ballistics, and the night vision with the included IR light, it's a hell of a package for the $1,000-1,500 these usually run.

Hits

+One-shot zero actually works — no walking shots in
+Day and night vision with the IR illuminator included
+Built-in laser rangefinder and ballistic calculator
+Recoil-activated recording backs up 10 seconds and saves your whole shot
+Rifle profiles let one scope hop between guns with a single confirmation shot

Misses

–Real learning curve — I read the manual three or four times and still needed YouTube
–Digitized picture doesn't match crystal-clear traditional rifle glass