Ever wonder why Modern Warefare 1 and 2 offer you both a red dot and holographic sights? I did and it turns out there may actually be some real life differences that the game applies.

Both a red dot and a holographic sights are reflex sights. Meaning they reflect a reticle. The advantage of these it you can have booth eyes open and the reticle retains its true point of aim. This is unlike iron sights where improper sight alignment screws your point of aim.

So back to Modern Warfare, in theory the red dot gives you a greater field of vision while the holographic it more restrictive. The holographic sight is more accurate due to parallax error. Essentially, what I stated before about retaining your true point of aim is not entirely accurate. When you get to the limits of the sights viewing angle, you will experience increasing deflection from your true point of aim. Holographic sights are better and retaining their true point of aim but the trade off is decreased viewing angle. Thus in Modern Warefare the holographic is more accurate than the red dot but dominating more of your field of view.

Most red dots like the Truglo that I recently bought use LEDs and the light source while EOTech uses a laser.

So there you go. Next time you are on the range or playing MW2 with your friends you can impress them with big words like, “refraction” and “parallax”, that is if you also read the Wikipedia articles I link to (which I found fascinating).

Later I will blog about my experiment with red dot sights and shotguns.