How We Test
Where our specifications come from
Every spec on a product page — field of view, close focus, eye relief, weight, range, accuracy, and similar — is sourced from the manufacturer’s own published documentation: an official product page or spec sheet. We record where each figure came from and when we retrieved it internally, and we don’t average, round, or adjust manufacturer-stated numbers. Occasionally a manufacturer’s own page doesn’t clearly state a number (this has happened); when that occurs, we either find a second, named, real source and say so, or we leave the field out rather than guess.
Where our prices come from
A price shown on this site is either a manufacturer’s stated MSRP — always labeled “MSRP” when it is one, never presented as a live price — or a specific retailer’s listed price at the time we checked it. We do not have live pricing-API access yet, so prices are not real-time; check the retailer link itself for the current price before buying.
What “hands-on testing” means here — and what it doesn’t, yet
We do not currently physically test the products we cover. Our verdicts and “who it’s for” guidance are built by comparing sourced specifications against each other and against publicly known use cases — not by using the product in the field. We say this plainly rather than implying otherwise, because a comparison built from real specs is still useful, and pretending it’s something it isn’t would undermine the one thing we can actually promise: that what we tell you is sourced and checkable. If we do start hands-on testing for certain products in the future, we’ll say so explicitly on that specific page — not apply it retroactively to pages that were never tested.
Ratings and reviews
We never invent a star rating or review count. If a product page shows no rating, that’s because we don’t have a real, sourced one — not a missing field we forgot to fill in.
Before a page goes live
Every page goes through an internal review before it’s published: checking that it has real editorial content (not just a name and a price), that every product it references has valid, non-placeholder specifications, that its metadata is complete, and that it doesn’t duplicate an existing page’s intent. A page passing that review still isn’t published automatically — publishing is a separate, deliberate step.