xs vs straight eight

night sights

  • xs

    Votes: 15 55.6%

  • straight eight

    Votes: 12 44.4%
  • Total voters
    27
  • Poll closed .
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I've used an XS Standard Dot with both a traditional rear sight and an XS sight. I have a lot of time with Novak sights and I focus on the front sight. Something about the rounded top of the XS just bugs me. I've made some great shots with it; but I just don't like it.
 
Whoa...that rear notch is huge. To think I was once worried to going to .156" from .140" was too much.

I have a similar setup on my 1911. Except that the rear sight was a proprietary design with a thicker blade and a vertical face to use for racking the slide one-handed...it is mated to a XS Small Dot.

The only thing I'm having a hard time adapting to is that the top of the front blade is rounded, so it is hard to align with the top of the ears of the rear blade
 
Something about the rounded top of the XS just bugs me. I've made some great shots with it; but I just don't like it.
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The only thing I'm having a hard time adapting to is that the top of the front blade is rounded, so it is hard to align with the top of the ears of the rear blade
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I've had this issue as well; it's hard to do precise elevation adjustments/alignments with the rounded top. In the end, I found that I could get solid groupings just by focusing on seeing the whole dot, and I've decided to be happy with that. Put differently, inside of 25 yards my groups are no better with an unmodified Heine and a 10-8 brass bead front so I'm concluding that I really need to stop worrying and learn to love the bomb.... :)

I'm certainly subjectively and objectively faster (retaining solid hits) with this setup than with the Heinie rear/brass bead front. I find that it's far easier to focus on the target and then find the front sight when I'm fixing to fire using the big dot, which was the point of the experiment.

Whoa...that rear notch is huge. To think I was once worried to going to .156" from .140" was too much.
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That's partly an artifact of camera perspective. At arm's length, the dot and the notch are well matched.
 
I'm a fan of Straight Eights, in the dark I find the dots easier to align than the three dot system. My experience with three dots is that if holding the gun incorrectly it was possible to put the front dot to the side of the rear dots and have a wider spread where i was trying to align on one of the rear dots. Yes, I was a newbie at the time. Any way, I went with straight eights, my group size halved over the stock Glock sights and I went on to qualify for the Australian IPSC team with that gun. 12 years later the vials have died but the sights are still solid.
 
If it is so dark that you can't see the rear sight, you wouldn't have enough light to identify your target.
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Lighting conditions may vary during an encounter - an adversary may move from ambient lighting that's good enough to identify him/her as a foe to an area where you can still ID him/her but cannot QUICKLY see your sights.

Or you may have already ID'd your target with a flashlight but ruined your night vision enough to make it difficult to QUICKLY see your sights in low light conditions in a dynamic situation.
 
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If I use my flashlight on something it is because I need to identify it and it probably already knows where I am, that being said, I find the illumination on the target out lines my sights nicely.
 
anyone have a picture of a u notch sight picture with a tritium front of some sort, with the measurements for the sight used? or even an xs used with a u notch, such as a big/standard dot in a .156/.140?
 
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