Not balanced - Vortex Viper HD 15-45x 65mm Spotting Scope

This scope has a fatal flaw in my opinion. It is quite surprising to me that it has never been mentioned by any other reviewer. The tripod mount is forward of the focusing ring, which places it way forward of the balance point. In other words, if you don’t tighten the tilt screw on your tilt and pan-head, the scope will fall towards you with the front lens pointing up. But the scope is so heavy (and believe me, this is a heavy scope) that even when you line it up on an object and tighten down the tilt screw, the scope will inevitably tilt upwards a little bit when you let go because no tripod head is stable enough not to have at least some flex in it. Perhaps one made for a cinema camera, but nobody carries something like that around with a spotter. It means that you have to learn to aim the scope a hair below what you want to look at, and then hope that the flex will bring the object into the field of view. That amount of deliberate misalignment of course changes depending on what magnification the scope is set to. This was simply not something I was prepared to deal with, so I returned it.

After having studied some more pictures of the Vortex Viper line of scopes it now seems clear to me that the 85 mm and the 65 mm models share the same body behind the tripod mounts. Since the glass of the 85 mm version is larger and protrudes further out it undoubtably places the balance points correctly over the tripod mount, but this is not the case for the lighter front end of the 65 mm version.