What on earth is Parallax on a riflescope? Learn about what Parallax is and how to use it from our expert Jerimiah Alexander on this episode of Riton University.

Transcript:

Hey guys, Jerimiah over at Riton University here to talk to you about Parallax.

Parallax has been difficult to explain, in all fairness, and difficult to understand. But I think that we’re going to fix it here together today. What is Parallax? And what am I adjusting for? Well, quite simply, when I am focusing through my scope, I have a target that needs to be focused upon and have a reticle that I need to be able to see. Well, what I want to do when I adjust my Parallax is get my reticle and my target on the same focal plane. One way to kind of like visually see this, if you will, with me, put your finger out in front of you. And if you focus on your finger, you’ll notice everything behind your finger is blurry. If I focus past my finger, then my finger is blurry. That is because they’re not on the same focal plane. And so we do have a mechanism to fix that.

The first thing that we’re going to do, we’re going to remove these caps because it makes it a little easier.

The first thing that we want to do is we have an ocular focus, a reticle focus. So once your scopes mounted up, you’re going to want to turn it to the high power. This is easy to do on like a white wall or up at a blue sky.

Guys don’t point your scope at the sun. Okay, up at a blue sky though. And you’re going to look through here. And it doesn’t matter if the target is blurry. All we’re worried about right now is the reticle.

So I’ve turned my magnification up, I’m looking at my white wall, and I’m turning this fast focus eyepiece back here, clockwise or counterclockwise until my reticle’s perfect.

A tip here, your eyes do a really good job of focusing, that’s what they’re supposed to do. So they will bring it into focus, even if it’s not. So the way to get away from that is I will look through here make an adjustment, and I’ll look away. And I’ll look through here and I’ll make another small adjustment until I feel like my reticle has been focused. So now that we have our fast focus eyepiece here adjusted. Now we can use our Parallax adjustment knob here, what we have is an infinity setting all the way on this 7 Conquer 3-18×50. It will focus from 10 yards in all the way out to infinity.

I have a little diagram here that I think is going to help show this pretty well.

Okay, guys. So here we have a little device that’s going to help us to understand what happens if our Parallax adjustment isn’t right.

So first, we’re going to say we have our target, or sorry, we have our target, and we have our reticle here on the same focal plane, go ahead and move your head around. And you’ll notice that my crosshairs stay in the center of my target. Doesn’t matter which way I go. But the moment that my target is not on the same focal plane as my reticle. If I’m to move my head around a little bit, you could see I would actually be pointing at a different part of the target or appear to be pointing in a different part of the target. So you will actually have a point of impact change. And a lot of people think something maybe is off with their scope and the adjustments, when what’s really off is your Parallax is not perfect, and that’s what’s causing you the problems.

Alright guys, so that’s Parallax 101. We’ll go deeper into Parallax later. But this is a basic way for us to understand what it is and how to overcome it. Again, if you have any questions, please reach out to us. Thanks, guys.