Ok Young'en, I'm going to fix you up, on the cheap. Here's the premise, scopes that are cheap are of poor construction and have all manor of ills, i.e., never put Jap spark-plugs in an ZR-1 Corvette, get it. Those scopes have all manor of ills, like the distortion already discussed. The good news is that many of the scope companies have great lifetime guarantees, make sure you ask about that, so if you have any problems and shooting off the reticles is a relatively small problem, compared to things that can happen to the cheapies. Generally speaking, stay away from the cheapies.
But, there are some exceptions to that above rule and one is the Nighteater from Nikko-Stirling. They use "Class One" lens, you know, the ones that are used in scopes worldwide, that start in the four figures-$$$$. Nikko-Stirling is an Australian Company that specializes in Professional Night Hunting, without electronics. And do these babies gather the light! I can see antlers on deer, on a moonlight night, at 200++yds. I got to tell you, these things work.
I was turned on to them by High-End Worldclass Pellet-Gun Champs. Now before one scoffs at that, let me explain. The "Spring" mechanisms of some classes of Pellet-Guns, that is the sharp and severe, back and forth action of the spring, is much harder on scopes than our 450b places on our glass, as in, that spring action really put the hurt on our glass components, they really do! Couple this with a quality tube, class one glass, etched reticles, and adjustments that are dangerously accurate in their repeatability and you gotta a winning combo. Now scopes in this class can and do cost $2000 to more than $3000 bucks, but MidWay has them for less than a $100 bucks and I bought a bunch on clearance from the NRA for $69, check the Web, ebay, ect. you probably can get to that $50 number and if you can buy one that is defective or broken (and the pro-circuit spring-gun guys have never-ever heard of a defective one), so much the better, sending it back to Nikko-Stirling will yield up a new replacement and they don't care what happened to it or who is sending it back, Lifetime to them means to any sender that sends it to them.
So, there are other ideas and many of them will be really great and maybe even better suited to your needs, but it will be diffidently difficult to beat the suggestion I just made. There is one limitation, Tactical they are not, Niko has Tactical, but for much more money than you want to spend, even though these scopes too are a great bargain. But that 1.5-6x is really great for your kind of hunting up there, "Been There-Done That"..and it's a 30mm tube!!
Good luck and scope that baby up..t
Nikko Stirling Platinum Nighteater Rifle Scope 1.5-6x 36mm Duplex Reticle Matte
http://www.midwayusa.com/viewproduct/?p ... ber=533230
Posted: Thu Jan 28, 2010 8:05 pm
well funny you should mention that brand 
I have a barska 3x9x42 tactical w/illuminated mildot that i moved from a mini14 to the 450b and it handles the recoil very well. the quick adjust elevation knob set at 100yds then moved to 200yds is close enough for tactical; but not sniper quality shots, but then again we are shooting .45 250gr bullets vs .223 55gr so i expected it to be low. 
the only draw backs are image distortion around the edges in low light conditions; not noticable in full daylight... and as for illuminated recticles 
checkout some of the other threads here... these guys have some really neat scope setups that probably aren't as expensive as you might think 
Sold! I can put the Barska back on the mini 