I like both of these pistols and have read nothing but good reviews on both. If you could only choose one which would it be?
Glock 17. Simple, rugged, accurate, reliable, easy to work on, parts availability…etc. Nothing but praise for it. 
If you’re going to buy tupperware, make sure it at least looks pretty. Get the CZ 75 Phantom. You can get 19 round mags and so capacity is not an issue. The grip is much more ergonomic than the Glock 17 which is like holding on to cricket bat handle.
If you’re going to buy tupperware, make sure it at least looks pretty. Get the CZ 75 Phantom. You can get 19 mags and so capacity is not an issue. The grip is much more ergonomic than the Glock 17 which is like holding on to cricket bat handle. The CZ 75 Phantom is extremely accurate (more so than the Glock), no problem with getting parts and is a breeze to maintain.
Without question, the Glock 17.
I offended many people on TOS when I said that the CZ guns do not have the track record that the 9mm Glocks have. None of the offended could seem to offer a valid counter argument.
The G17 (which is FAR from my favorite handgun, by the way) is by any measure a really good handgun. If I was forced to carry one from now on I’d be just fine with it.
The CZ-75 isn’t a bad handgun…but as far as I can tell it doesn’t offer the service life and ease of support that the G17 will. I’m certainly not going to be an advocate of being the guinea pig on a new polymer version of the SP01.
The G17 is a known quantity as much as any handgun can be. Any one sitting on gunstore shelves could be a lemon, but in general the G17s work well out of the box and there is an incredibly large knowledge base about the weapons you can draw from for support. Lots of readily available, easily replaceable parts. Lots of hicaps out there at reasonable prices.
Id say Glock 17 if you can only have one since it is simple, rugged, accurate, and reliable. I have only shot one a couple of times though.
I do shoot the CZ quite often though and it points naturally and fits great in my hand. Its got that “gun” feel if you know what I mean due to the metal frame and slide.
Quick story that doesnt really have any value but it has to do with these two guns. And I like to tell it.
Guy at the range comes up to me and says “Whatcha shootin’?” I say “CZ75” he goes “yea that thing is nothing but a boat anchor” and proceeds to show me is polymer G17. He loads a mag and shoots and misses all of the six steel targets except one out of a whole magazine. I didnt say anything and then shot all six targets with 6 rounds. He didnt say anything either.
If you were comparing the Glock 17 to a more proven CZ model, let’s say the 75, the 85, or the SP-01 (metal version), then it’s hands down, no contest, get the CZ. It’s head and shoulders above the Glock IMO, a better gun in nearly every respect except for the ease of disassembly, and of getting spare parts (fortunately with CZ’s, you don’t need the spare parts too often, and yes, you can get them when you need them). The problem is, of course, these CZ models are all steel and much heavier than the Phantom or the G17.
When you compare a proven weapon like the G17 to a relative newcomer like the Phantom, a polymer gun which is relatively unproven in the CZ line, then it would be hard to objectively recommend the Phantom. It just hasn’t been around long enough yet.
But if you want a quality, lightweight, full-sized 9mm, why limit yourself to the G17 and the Phantom? Why not also look at some other options, like the S&W M&P full-size 9mm, for instance?
G17
If comparing to a SP-01… G 17
BTW I am a CZ fanboy… but go ahead and try to find a quality holster for the SP-01. I’m sure the phantom will be just as bad.
FWIW I dont really agree with the way all non Glock pistols are immidiatly put in some box labled substandard because they may or may not(in basically all cases simply wont, dont, and no matter what changes may be made to the design in the future simply never will) last as long as a glock. Just because the glock my go some 100k to 200k rounds on the same gun and the m&p has been proven to go beyond the 50k mark doesnt mean that a gun like the CZ that goes 30k+(the requirement and achieved goal of the P-01 before it could become a Nato handgun) is a bad gun. CZ are known to go 30k+ on the CZ 75 and SP-01 variants as well.
Just to put things into perspective 30k of 9mm right now is about $7000. I personally find that I shoot a CZ well and will be willing to simply buy another when I reach the service limit of the pistol.
Also the CZ is pretty simple to keep running. There are a couple of known “problem points” in the design. One is the slide stop that supposidly takes quite a beating. I bought some extras to replace once I hit 10k on my SP-01 and then every 10k after that as a precaution. Though honestly I cant think of actually ever seeing or even hearing of one breaking on a 9mm CZ (I have heard of slide stops breaking on .40’s). There is one other trouble point but I cant for the life of me remember what it was… maby someone else will chime in.
Also though it is technically not a prob with the gun it is something CZ shooters have to deal with. The mags are not great. I have though started using the Mec-Gar AFC mags and they seem to be good though I have only put a couple hundred rounds through them. I am keeping my fingers crossed.
BTW my sp-01 has aprox 5-6k rounds through it now. I cleaned it regularly for the first 1000 rounds or so then started shooting IDPA with it (not legal weight but club allow it for club events) and got lazy. It went 3-4k without cleaning before I started having stoppages.
But ya G17;)
Glock 17, no question. I’ve owned 5 CZs over the years and every single one of them have had problems. Whether it be broken trigger return springs, broken slide stops, poor quality controls that effect operation, or trigger slap…CZs are not in the same league as Glock, H&K, or Sig. In fact, several of CZs competition models come with extra slide stops because, unlike the majority of CZ owners…competition shooters actually shoot their pistols in excess of 15k rounds.
CZs feel excellent in the hand, but choosing a pistol because it feels good in your hand is third in line behind reliability and durability. Your primary requirements of a defensive pistol are that it be reliable and durable…you can train with any pistol design and get used to its feel. Determination of a pistol model’s reliability and durability is determined by a LARGE sample of pistols in service by people that use and abuse it such as LE or military. You will find a few passionate CZ owners that own a couple of pistols an swear by them, but then again you will find just as many that swear by Hi-Points. Small samples versus large samples.
Ok I still feel like I am on the fence here, so i will elaborate on the use of the pistol. this will be a ccw/ car gun. I will probably not shoot 15,000 rds through it but I want the pistol to eat everything i feed it including the despised wolf ammo. Also how is customer service for Glock and CZ if something breaks or is defective?
Both brands have good customer service.
The Glock will still be better. It is far more corrosion resistant, less finicky with dirt and grime, and has a long track record of shooting anything reliably you want to put through it.
The CZ’s polycoat finish is fine as long as you don’t have a scratch on it. However, it scratches pretty easily and wears pretty easily and the carbon steel under it is not very rust resistant. The Glock finish is very resistant to scratches, and the steel under it is very corrosion resistant. Small parts on the CZ are just blued carbon steel, which rust easily with sweat and other moisture. Small parts on the Glock are corrosion resistant and the finish provides even more resistance.
The CZ’s slide design which is a frame-wrap-around-slide configuration has roughly 50% more bearing surface. Dust dramatically increases slide friction and is more likely to impede function. Secondly, the circular barrel locking lugs of the CZ do not “drain” debris as well as the large square lug that you see on Glocks, Sigs, and H&Ks. The FBI tested the CZ 75 in the 1993 trials and it did “okay”. It didn’t do too well with the dust testing.
I’ll paraphrase an SME here:
If you want to treat a pistol like a lawnmower, buy a Glock.
Marcus, I think you had a bit of bad luck with the CZs…
But I have to mostly agree with you, broken slide stops and poor QC on springs and a few small parts make the CZ 75 an iffy choice. I have seen these problems in my CZ 75 and several others from friends. It´s a shame because I really like the pistol. There is also the issue of manually lowering the hammer for DA carry if you don’t have the decocker versions.
The facrtory spare part competition kit of the CZ has SIX slide stops so you can replace them often, that should say something…
The G17 and perhaps the Sig P 226 are the most proven service pistols around. The Beretta 92 FS is also a great choice but I don’t like the safety and it breaks locking blocks. The HK pistols are not as popular around here so I cannot comment.
My first CZ was a 75b 9mm which was definately the best of the bunch. It was reliable, accurate, and I enjoyed it a lot. However, I decided to take it to a combat pistol course in Arizona in 2002 and the environment took the luster out of it. There was a lot of blowing sand that day, and after about 200rds the pistol started to have a lot of hicups. The Glocks, Sigs, and H&Ks in the course finished strong that day. I later attributed it to the dusty environment.
My next CZ was a 97b .45acp. It had a poor feed ramp design which would not reliably feed hollow points…CZ has still not fixed this problem. Most JHPs would nose dive into the bottom of the feed ramp and the force of the closing action rounded off the flimsey magazine catch and the magazine popped out of the grip. This is a common problem with the 97b which CZ has not fixed in 12 years of production. I also cracked a barrel bushing after 650rds of standard pressure ammunition.
My third CZ was a P-01 9mm. In the beginning, I was in love with this pistol. It was light, well balanced, felt outstanding in the hand, and was a very natural pointer. However, recoil was a little hard with high pressure ammo and occasionally I would get the common “trigger slap” from these recoil effects. After approximately 1200rds I broke the trigger return spring. I broke the trigger spring again after 2200rds. At 2800rds I broke a slide stop. At 3900rds I broke another trigger return spring. At 5200rds I broke another slide stop. I repaired it for the last time and then sold it. I attribute those problems to recoil as a result of light slide mass and the design of the trigger mechanism. I’d hate to see how the .40S&W P-01 handles.
My fourth CZ was 75 compact 9mm. Only broke one trigger return spring on this one at 2400rds.
My last CZ was a SP-01 9mm. The pistol was too nose heavy for a duty or carry pistol, so I didn’t get a whole lot of use out of it. I sent it back to CZ to repair a broken ejector after around 1500rds and sold it.
Sure, my experience is a small sample, but I put my pistols through heavy use and I expect them to hold up.
To better help the thread starter, I have never broken a Glock. I tend to prefer traditional hammer fired pistols like Sigs and H&Ks, but the Glock is on my short list of outstanding pistol designs.
Marcus, great post. Your numbers really make the case. I can tell you must have liked your CZs and that you clearly tried hard to make them work out for you.
I’ve had two interactions with Glock’s customer service, and both were very positive. Initially when the pistol came into my possession it had less than 50 rounds through it, but all of a sudden the trigger would not release the sear, the trigger would just bottom out against the frame without releasing the striker. Sent it to Glock, came back very quickly and never had another problem with it (except when shooting 115gr Alum. Blazers, getting failure of slide to go completely into battery, but this was was my first semi auto handgun and I truly believe, looking back, that I was limp wristing it, anyway never tried shooting the alum. blazers through it again).
Then last year I decided to get a Glock parts upgrade (mine is a 2nd gen that I got in 1989) and have the slide refinished. Glock did the upgrade, and refinished the slide, totally free of charge. It was like having a new pistol (my only reluctance was that my trigger which had smoothed into a really good trigger action was back to a new slightly rough state).
Anyway I was/am very impressed with Glock’s service.
I’m not convinced. As for the “numbers” provided, we are talking about 4 total CZ pistols (I exclude the 97B as it is a .45 and not directly part of the 75-family, plus the OP is looking at 9mm pistols). Out of a roughly estimate 2.5 million CZ-75 based pistols in service worldwide, 4 pistols comprises 0.0000016, or 0.00016%, which is statistically insignificant.
The fact is, I have seen Glocks break as well. I have seen a Glock with a cracked frame, and I owned a Glock 19 on which the trigger return spring broke. These numbers too, are statistically insignificant based on the number of reliable Glocks in service. As Marcus said earlier, “Small samples versus large samples.”
The fact is, any type of pistol you get is going to occasionally give you issues. But the CZ-75 based pistols are pretty well established as reliable. And given that nobody provides public “reliability data” on their pistols, another way to establish the reliability of a pistol design is to see which designs are being mostly widely used (because that tends to suggest that users gravitate toward the better guns).
Here’s a point that is sometimes missed about the excellence of the modern CZ design. The CZ-75’s basic design (which influences all the modern full-sized CZ models to some degree) is probably (after the Colt 1911) among the most widely used and copied pistol design in the world. If the CZ’s fundamental design is poor and the gun unreliable, then for a “poor” design it has surely acquired a massive following of imitators.
A few modern pistol models/platforms that have been either directly “cloned” from, or significantly influenced by the CZ-75:
- Tanfoglio pistols of Italy (for example, the TZ-75, TA-90)
- Jericho pistols (Israel)
- British Sterling (pistol, not the submachine gun)
- Jeff Cooper’s baby, the Bren Ten
- The Armalite 24 pistols, made in Turkey
- EAA Witness pistols
- Springfield P-9
- Norinco NZ pistols
- ITM AT-84 and AT-88 pistols (Switzerland)
- Sphinx M2000 pistols (Switzerland)
- MRI Baby Eagle pistol (Magnum Research of the USA)
Further, when you look at all the countries today whose police forces or military use the CZ-75, or one of its direct clones or descendants, the CZ company claims there are over 60 countries (many of them in Eastern Europe, parts of Africa, and South America) using the basic CZ design. I don’t know how to substantiate that, but CZ firearm products in general are sold in over 100 countries according to their corporate yearbook. and there are a lot of former Soviet bloc countries using these pistols, so the figure of 60 countries seems plausible. Here are some of the countries and organizations currently using variations of the CZ-75 are listed here.
Bottom line: my experience with the CZ-75 based pistols has been exactly opposite that of Marcus L. The most that can be concluded from Marcus’s experience with 4 CZ-75 family pistols is that he had a bad run of luck. Given his experience, maybe I’d feel the same way. However for me, the CZ’s have been THE most reliable pistols I have owned, even with high round counts, when compared to Glock, Sig, Taurus, Springfield, and S&W 9mm pistols. Further, I think that the majority of users around the world that use the CZ, or variants, have had similar experiences to mine, and that is at least partly why the gun has become so popular, and so widely imitated.
This of course does not answer the OP’s question of whether he should get a CZ Phantom or a Glock for his pistol. Depending on how he plans to use it, good arguments could be made either way. But if he is looking at entire pistol-family platforms, like the CZ-75 platform that lies behind the Phantom, some of this info is good to have on hand.
I’m curious - How many rounds do you have through yours (what are your high round counts)? Have you fired a large number of rounds through any of them during a training class in adverse conditions (IE: getting covered with sand)? Does your success rate provide a good statistical sample?
I’m only curious for the sake of academics, really. I tried to like the CZ platform several years ago, but they did not live up to what I expect from a defensive arm and got rid of all 5 of them. My issues were more along the lines of usability, but other reports along the lines of what Marcus has stated just sealed the deal for me as deal-breakers.
A lot of people are happy with theirs, I could just never trust them the way I would trust a Glock.
I’ve owned several CZ’s (all in the 75, 85, SP-01 class), with my current 85 combat setting my personal record at 13,700 rounds, another earlier one passed 9500, and another one got to about 5100. Plus I have owned several other CZ-75 family pistols, most recently an SP-01 tactical (the decocker model with night sights), all but one of which exceeded 1500 rounds. But I digress: as I said earlier, my small sample of success with CZ’s is really no more germane than someone else’s small sample of failure. It is statistically insignificant, and the ONLY thing I can fairly conclude from it is that “CZ’s have been veddy veddy good to me.”
My point in the earlier thread is that CZ’s were adopted so widely around the world precisely because they are durable and can take the punishment. I believe that the organizations that adopted them in other countries, especially police and militaries, DO have the high round counts through them, and that is precisely why the CZ’s have been popular. Further, CZ’s are popular on the competition circuit, with the SP-01’s doing extremely well in the IPSC category recently (Adam Tyc won the world champsionship in 2008 with an SP-01 in Bali, and the American shooters from CZ-USA won the team gold with SP-01’s. And the comps shooters rack up VERY high round counts through theirs, with folks like Angus Hobdell having in excess of 50K rounds on one of his guns without any breakage, for instance. I simply don’t accept the accusation–which I have NEVER seen backed up with any actual evidence–that “CZ’s only APPEAR to be reliable because their owners don’t shoot them very much.”
Also, you mentioned “usability.” From my perspective, the “usability” or more specifically the “shootability” of the CZ-75 family guns is one of the primary things that attracts me to them. I don’t just mean accuracy, I mean things like the way they soak up recoil, the way they recover from rapid shots, the low bore axis, the way they point so naturally, the perfect grip angle, and on the list could go. For me personally, it’s the fact that CZ’s just naturally “shoot so well” that makes me prefer them over every other gun in 9mm.
Damn! You must have King Kong crickets in your neck of the woods, if you need bats to rock their noggins! And tell me, if that CZ breaks, how much is the postage to Checkdatsouvlakia, or whatever the hell that place is called, to get it repaired? And how many rubles or goats, or whatever it costs to get it fixed?:eek: