Review: ZeroTech Trace 1x28 HALO reflex sight

The ZeroTech Trace 1×28 HALO red dot sight works superbly on pistols and rifles, designed to provide a particularly low sight picture in addition to its clear and wide-angle view.

It was touted as the first fully enclosed aspherical-lens sight but the design aspect that I particularly admire is its top-mounted battery compartment, which in turn results in a very thin base, a low-mounted lens and some real benefits that come as a result.

ZeroTech Trace 1x28 HALO review — The ZeroTech red dot sits very low in the mounting cutout on pistol slides, providing easy co-witnessing of sights

I mounted the HALO to a rifle and took it hunting and then to a pistol for club competition — in both applications it worked well, showing some distinct advantages each time.

The HALO’s footprint is the Shield RMSc standard, so it will go straight onto a large range of popular handguns, and the sight also comes with a separate Picatinny mount that you can screw it to before fixing it to anything with a pic rail.

With the aid of the pic mount, it clamped onto a Chiappa .357 lever-gun I was testing.

And without the need for that mount, the ZeroTech went straight onto my Springfield Echelon with its standard-issue adaptable mounting solutions.

The box includes an additional pair of M4x0.7 screws that match the Springfield Hellcat, Glock 43/43X MOS, Stoeger STR-9 and Beretta 80X Cheetah.

ON A PISTOL

With no battery under the lens, the HALO sits very, very low — so low that it will let you use the iron sights on many of the pistols it’ll mount to, if their mounting face is cut low enough. You can see it in the photos of the Echelon.

This makes sighting-in dead easy: I just lined up the iron sights and dialled the red dot right onto the front sight post.

Because the HALO has no parallax error beyond a few metres, you don’t have to aim with the dot on the front post. As long as you can see it on the target, you will be aiming true.

It is possible you’ll raise the pistol with muzzle down and the dot will be hidden behind the rear sight, but at the same time you can see that the front post is also low so you know instinctive to raise the muzzle — and suddenly your red dot reappears in the window.

In those rare moments when you might have your red dot set fairly dim and find yourself in bright light with a non-contrasting target — so the dot is almost invisible — your iron sights are right there, ready to back you up.

The setup is perfect for those who don’t trust electronics to be utterly reliable, while on the other hand if you find the iron sights an irritation you can get rid of them.

This natural co-witnessing of the sights is one of the best things about the HALO, without a shadow of doubt.

Of course, it’s all possible because ZeroTech put the battery up top, with nothing but the 5mm wafer of a base underneath. Clever design.

ON A RIFLE

Mounted on the little Chiappa 1892 Alaskan’s Picatinny rail, the HALO sits higher than the rifle’s aperture sight, so you don’t get the co-witnessing ability that you have on a handgun. I wasn’t concerned.

The bigger issue with using a rail and adapter on almost any rifle designed for open-sighted use is that the rifle’s comb is usual too low to match the higher sight-line you end up with. You can’t get your cheek properly onto the stock to hold and aim steadily.

The HALO’s low-line design counters this, by at least a few millimetres compared with other reflex and red-dot sights. For me, the Chiappa-HALO combo was perfectly aligned.

Mounted forward of the receiver, the sight always held the illuminated dot directly in my eyeline when I shouldered the rifle, so I didn’t have to search for it before getting a good sight picture, a vital attribute if you really want to take advantage of a red dot’s potential for speed.

This is helped by the ZeroTech’s 28mm lens size and its aspherical shape, which ever so slightly widens the field of view. Smaller reflex sights, in my experience, are often a handicap.

The combination of HALO and 1892 carbine was fantastic for a goat cull in thick and steep country, because you get fast shooting, quick target acquisition and very good accuracy with all the safety and awareness benefits of both-eyes-open shooting.

The point of impact is adjusted in 1.5 MOA increments, which is rather coarse, but in practical terms it’s good enough for a rig like this that will generally be used against medium to large animals at close range, and rarely much further than 100m. I wanted to be more critical about it but in the field I could not come up with an example in which I needed better accuracy; I never missed because of it.

DESIGN AND DETAILS

The lens is fully enshrouded by the 7075 aluminium body, which gives the glass a lot of protection from drops and other shock loads.

As well as the front lens, there’s a rear panel of glass to keep dust, water and everything else away from the all-important optics.

Mind you, it’s not foolproof: using a fat-shafted torque wrench to do up the HALO’s mounting screws, I let it rest against the rear glass and the pressure I applied cracked it. Take my advice and use the slender Torx wrench that ZeroTech supplies, which will fasten the screws just fine.

The top-loading CR2032 button battery can be changed in a minute and negates the need to dismount the optic from the firearm. A handy tool is supplied that unscrews the cap (a coin will also do it). The finely threaded cap is sealed tightly with an o-ring.

Battery life is extended by the auto-off function that kicks in when the sight hasn’t moved for a short time; the sight wakes in a heartbeat when you pick up the firearm so there’s no delaying your shot.

Not that battery life should be an issue. ZeroTech claims around 50,000 hours from it. I certainly didn’t drain it.

Buttons of the side of the sight’s body control on/off and brightness. They’re perfectly placed to use them quickly and intuitively, but the one drawback I found, most notably on the rifle, was that when you put the gun down, if the weight rests on the low-side button, it’ll change your illumination or even turn it off. You learn to pay attention.

Like all ZeroTechs, the HALO comes packaged in a quality protective box, with accessories including tools that cover all tasks, the mounts mentioned above, a rubber hood, a lens cloth and a QR code that will open the detailed PDF manual. There’s also a 1° (60 MOA) shim in there in case you need extra elevation.

It has one of the best lifetime warranties in the industry, and while it’s made in China you can’t knock the quality, and you have the assurance that ZeroTech is an Australian company.

There’s a hell of a lot to like about the HALO, including its $549 price. There must be millions of reflex sights on the market these days, many of them very good, but when I did bit of trawling around to check and compare, it was obvious the ZeroTech is one of the ones you’d put on your shortlist and, once you weight up the value, would be highly likely to settle on.

It’s great on a rifle or pistol, is quite compact without being so small you can’t find the dot easily, has very good optics and has that great high-battery design, something that gets your sight picture lower and brings all the advantages I’ve mentioned.