Swing and a miss - SightMark Volta Solar Red Dot Sight

I'd like to preface this review with a note. None of the following is directed towards OpticsPlanet or their employees. All of this is directed firmly with SightMark and their parent company Sellmark.

The Volta Solar RDS is a sleek design with great ambitions and potential, from it's Solar cell power with auto adjusting brightness to it's... Oh wait hold on it's suppose to be a dual power format Solar or Battery operated right? Well that's where things fall off and I should have taken the heeds of warning in the back of my head. The battery power option from day one never worked and while I thought to myself, "oh you just did something wrong," I didn't know how wrong I was. While the solar power would work the key to that functionality is "SOLAR" or some form of light to trigger the cell to finally kick in and finally power the RDS. So if your intents are to use this for home defense I recommend setting up some smart floodlights inside your house that are voice activated, because otherwise it won't work in the dark.

Ok so here lets give it a go and say you buy this and your battery functionality works. You turn it on for the first time and... oh wait you can't turn it off besides switching solar mode which according to the manual still has the capabilities to access the batteries for "backup" purposes. So you turn it on and pray that the batteries haven't died if you ever do need it.

So I did what I believed was the best option and I contacted OpticsPlanet and said "hey, I have this issue what can I do I only bought this 2 weeks ago?" Brett the wonderful OP rep told me "listen you can send it back to SightMark(SellMark) for Warranty or you can send it to us and we'll work something out." Ladies and gents this is where I failed myself again, I went you know what lets send it in to SightMark since it's under warranty and see what they say. SightMark gets back to me after I ship it and says yeah it's broken and it's our fault so we will send you a replacement, BUT this product is currently on a backorder for us with no known ETA so either you can wait an unknown potentially ridiculous amount of time or we can give you company credit for the cost of the optic and you can choose from 1-2 other optics that we will allow you to substitute. Mind you the only other optics we have for this credit limit are your standard pistol size RDS that you might do a canted mount on your AR for. Note to self I should have just worked with OP to get this taken care of.

TLDR: This product has great potential, but fails to deliver. Lack of actual "turn off" functionality could leave you stranded or you could just get a product that doesn't work on batteries.