Cyelee Ghost HDG Review — A Budget SRO(ish)?

About a week or two after our Cyelee Wolf X Pro review, we're back with the Cyelee Ghost HDG — and if it looks familiar, it should. This is basically the baby brother to the Cyelee Bull, that extremely large optic that's been making its way around the competition circuit. Cyelee took the feedback, scaled it down, thinned it up so it actually clears holsters and stays legal in competition, and kept the giant viewing window that made the Bull famous.

The specs: RMR footprint, a 26.5 by 22.5 viewing window — larger than the Trijicon SRO — with a 2 MOA dot and 26 MOA circle you can run independently, same as the Wolf X Pro. You get shake-awake and auto-off, eight daytime brightness settings plus two night-vision settings, a side-loading battery compartment rated at 50,000 hours so you're never taking the thing off to change a battery, and windage on the side with elevation up top.

It's also drop rated to six feet on a 45-ounce gun directly onto concrete. My X5 Legion with a light on it sits somewhere around the mid-40s ounces, so it's the perfect example — and no, I'm not throwing my X5 Legion on concrete to prove it. That's just not going to happen. But I pounded the crap out of the Wolf X Pro and it took it, and from the way this thing is built, I believe the Ghost would too.

Range day came with a blooper: I put the extractor back in backwards after cleaning and it fell out when I racked a round. Fixed that, got back to business, and the sight-in was painless — pretty darn close on paper right out of the box, a couple clicks up, and then we went to steel. From 10-15 yards and then stepped back further, it ran like a champ. The brightness is fantastic even on a bright day, and with that enormous window you're picking up the next target as you're coming across — it is absolutely built for that.

My one real gripe is the same one I had on the Wolf X Pro: the reticle is too small for the window. A 2 MOA dot with a 26 MOA circle gets a little lost in that much glass — I'd love somewhere around a 3-5 MOA dot with a 35-36 MOA circle. When you've got the real estate, use it. And on the practical side, this is probably not the optic to conceal carry with; the footprint is large enough that it's really going to poke through.

Bottom line: I could see shooting competition with this thing all day, and it probably has some duty use in it too. Cyelee keeps impressing me — everything we've reviewed from them so far has been quality, and they're not getting enough credit on the market today. If you want SRO-style glass without SRO money, take a look.