I stopped at the ‘Tactical Aiming Solutions’ booth (an Israeli company) on Thursday and they had a very interesting set of pistol sights. Its a monolithic aluminum block thats machined so that when you look at them from behind it mimics a set of traditional 3 post sights.
Here’s the kicker though, running down the center is a tube with either a fiber optic or tritium dot at the end. Basically, you can’t see the dot unless you have proper sight pictures. Its sort of a low tech, super simple red dot for a pistol. Here’s the really weird part, you don’t use the front sight. Its really hard to explain in words, but they had a Glock setup up with a bore laser and these sights and even without previous experience with them I was able to use the sights in a version of Bindon Aiming Concept and they are scary fast and accurate.
They gave me a fiber optic version, I’m going to run it on my G34 for a bit and I’ll report back to you guys. Defense Review looked at a rough prototype back in 07 and called them interesting (but didn’t fire them, so wasted breath imo). I want to see how these perform day/night/low light and see they with ‘real’ recoil if they’re as fast as they are with the simulator.
They’re available now. The finish is ‘ok’ if not mindblowingly good, like say Tru-Glo products. Tritiums have a MSRP of 120.00, Fiber Optic are 90. Looks like the street prices will be 90 & 70ish. swat@t-a-s.co.il is the main email (I think).
You don’t have a reference aiming point on your pistol until you acquire a near-perfect sight picture from the looks of their concept. Understanding the fundamentals of pistol shooting, I am very skeptical of this theory.
I am interested in seeing some feedback or shooting a set before I condemn them but it looks like more gimmicky Israeli gun crap to me. YMMV.
My guess is that the prototype/earlier version, which was basically just the tube with the fo/trit, was a flop because of that very reason. I’m fairly certain that problem is why the newer version mimics the look (from the rear) of a traditional 3 point sight system.
(That’s the prototype on the right, which lacks any reference point at all)
Gross sight picture get you ‘to’ the tube, the dot refines from there. When Heather first pointed their product out to me at the booth, I was very skeptical, but even dryfiring was pretty damn quick despite having 0 previous experience with these.
The TAS appears to use a similar concept to the old Singlepoint night sight, with all its attendant problems.
While I’m sure that it is possible to do acceptable shooting with the TAS, it doesn’t look like it does anything that a conventional set of pistol irons won’t do better. In particular, the TAS appears to be slow to pick up, and the very short sight radius would provide little visual feedback while shooting rapidly. I would not want to try and make a precise shot at 15+ yards with the TAS.
I’ve long been of the opinion that the Patridge-style iron sight system for handguns is the pinnacle of its intended function - no real improvement is possible without a major categorical change (see: RDO, laser designator, etc.)
Didn’t see this at the show and thus I can only go by how it’s been described and the pics, but I’m with Chris. This doesn’t appear to do anything better than notch & post sights and looks like it would do some important things (precision at speed) worse.
Todd and M4Guru how about you two get your hands on a set and do some T&E. And let us lowly shooters know how your honest opinion. Only real way to see if it is a legit thing or just a flop.
Well, I was opened minded enough to devote a LOT of rounds and a couple of years to XS Big Dots before returning to Warren Tactical sets. So I’ll keep an open mind on these. The concept of not seeing the sweet spot until in proper sight picture position reminded me of my other experiment last year with a FastFire on a G19. The visual “hunting” for the right orientation to pick up the red dot was manageable on the repeatable drill of running down a rack of steel plates but for more dynamic moving and target acquisition I quickly learned to hate the FastFire.
Todd and M4Guru how about you two get your hands on a set and do some T&E. And let us lowly shooters know how your honest opinion. Only real way to see if it is a legit thing or just a flop.
At this point I have 0 range time except for the simulator that they were running there. I will say this, for people who have trouble shooting regular pistol notch & post pistol sights stereoscopically (both eyes open, which I do), these are much easier since you only have two items (rear sight and target) as opposed to three items (front sight, rear sight, target), so the stereoscopic overlap is a bit smoother (to me).
