After posting I did realize that I did forget some details.
I basically want a setup like I had on my older Saint - a Romeo and Juliet. My goal is just to have a dot for simple range/action shooting. My budget is good. Thanks
Budget is medium ($400 down) and all I want is a simple rig to do some action shooting at my local range. Nothing beyond 100 yards - perhaps self-defense. Like I said, my older Saint only had a Sig Romeo on it.
If you're sticking with range-work and recreational-level competition (i.e. not high-stakes) only, then in all honesty, repeating what you did with the Sig optics or going with their sister Holosun or Primary Arms optics will be just fine, ditto the lower end of the Vortex items. These optics really have proven themselves over the course of the last few years, and their warranties are solid, too.
In all honesty, jumping to self-defense use makes me a bit more ambivalent. While I would not have a problem, per-se, employing these items in such a role (as based on their empirical performance and durability/reliability reports over the last half-decade, if not more) - but I would also be more inclined to invest a bit more, given your stated budget.
The Aimpoint PRO as cited by
@KillerFord1977 above is time-proven, with none other than Larry Vickers having openly declared it to be, in his opinion, the best bang-for-the-buck duty/service-grade RDS available at the time (~ 5 years ago). Yes, that's not exactly yesterday, but as a result, you can now quite easily get one of these sights second-hand, with well-cared-for examples easily had for $350 to even as low as $300.
This would the leave you $100 for either an aftermarket mount for the optic or, alternatively, seeing as you prefer to have a magnifier behind the optic, you can certainly pay for a good chunk of a reasonably nice magnifier, on a swing-away or Q/D mount.
The PRO isn't the latest-and-greatest and also requires a compromise of weight and rail-estate, but that durability/reliability is the real trade-off.
Speaking of size and weight, I always ask those who use RDS+magnifier combos to check and see how much their weight/space trade-off is, versus a modern, true-1x LPVO. In my opinion, the higher-quality glass (at price-comparable, when looking at RDS+magnifier combos) -and additional magnification- of the LPVO can really make for a very convincing argument for itself.
aimpoint.us
