VORTEX VENOM RED DOT

We love red dots. And we love them for a couple reasons: First off, we’re range rats; we spend most of our time shooting at distances of 100 metres or less. And secondly, there are few optics as versatile as a red dot. Be it a shotgun, rifle, or pistol, a decent red dot can just about aim them all.

And one of the newest product offerings to break into the market as of late in the red dot world is this: the Vortex Venom. It’s a proper firearms-grade red-dot that’s compact enough to fit on a pistol slide, but has an enlarged window, and it costs just over $300. For comparison’s sake, that’s slightly more than red dots like the popular Burris Fastfire 3, but with a few additional features and a larger lens.

Being a Vortex optic, the first thing one notices with the Venom is the overall package, and all the stuff that comes with it. We don’t usually talk about the “unboxing” experience, but Vortex does a particularly good job of giving their customers an abundance of stuff along with their optics, and the Venom is no different. Safely ensconced within a nice chunk of foam, you get the optic itself, a slick little picatinny mount, and the hardware to marry the two… replete with a spare screw in case you lose one! Furthermore, you get a torx wrench to do the screws up, and a double-ended screwdriver with two flathead ends (large and small) to open the battery compartment and make sighting adjustments. You also get a battery, a decent little instruction manual, and a lens cleaning cloth. Oh, and a nice soft rubber optic cover to protect the Venom and that will help conserve battery when the sight is not in use.

With the entire thing assembled, we tossed the Venom on an ADM QD mount to serve as a riser, and stuck it on one of our testbed Colt Canada IUR rifles. This brings us to one of the upsides to the Venom over the Burris: The range of adjustment built into the optic for zeroing. The Burris’ elevation and windage adjustments top out at 110 MOA and 86 MOA respectively while the Venom allows for 130 and 100 MOA. Furthermore, we quite liked having the larger window to look through, with the Venom’s objective lens measuring 26 mm wide and 16 mm tall. That’s only one millimeter taller than the Burris but five millimeters wider, which makes it a lot easier to get on target faster, especially when used atop a pistol where it can be difficult to find the red dot way out there at arm’s length.

In terms of functionality, the Venom is currently only available with a 3 MOA red dot, but has a variety of brightness modes. We tried to count them by cycling through, but gave up as it seemed like there was an almost infinite amount of steps between the lowest and brightest settings. During our range time with the Venom we used the built-in automatic brightness mode, which is accessed by holding the up arrow until the red dot blinks three times. Manual brightness adjustment mode is then accessed by holding the up arrow until the red dot blinks just twice. However, we had no occasion to use manual mode, as auto worked fine for us and also turns the red dot off after a short period of disuse when the rubber cover is placed over the sight. That helps conserve battery power and makes sure the sight is ready to be used as soon as you remove the cover.

Now, to be fair, we did not really abuse the Venom much. Sure, it did get bumped up against our various other pieces of kit and a couple wooden barriers as our rifle dangled from a sling, and the optic did end up taking a pretty solid tumble when we accidently ended up fumbling it and drop kicking it downrange in an attempt to save it with our foot… but it shows very little wear and, more importantly, still works just fine. That said, for hard use on long arms, we’d like to see an additional heavier hood come out as a Vortex accessory, but as of now there’s no such device.