Apex Optics is a new company in Canada that will have its first optic on the market fairly shortly. Despite the number of empty booths at SHOT this year, it is still hard to get a booth for the small guys. Thankfully our friends over at MDT were nice enough (they are Canadian, they have to be) to display the Rival from Apex Optics on some of the rifles in their booth. While the Rival isn’t made in Canada (it hails from Japan) the company is based out of Alberta — a place known to have loads of wide-open shooting areas.

The Apex Optics Rival was designed with competition in mind. Here it is on a rifle equipped with the MDT XRS Chassis.

The Rival is a first focal plane scope with a 34mm tube that has 4-32x magnification. The scope comes with MRAD turrets and a Christmas tree-style reticle. Much like the Tangent Theta that I am used to working with the turret has a second rotation indicator that pops out so you can easily keep track of what you dialed along with a zero stop. The optic uses extra-low dispersion glass and also includes 6 levels of illumination on the reticle.

The Apex Optics Rival looks great on this rifle using the new TMBR stock from MDT.

The Rival has 32 Mils of elevation and 20 mils of adjustment for wind. One of the things I was really happy to see is parallax from 15 yards to infinity so it can even work on your rimfires in competition. The turrets are very tactile and quite audible. The included throw leaver for magnification works well even if I am not super crazy about the color, but I prefer performance over looks, and paint fixes everything.

Now onto the part I thought was interesting about their business model. Instead of using retailers and other distributors to sell their optics, you can only get it from them. This means that there isn’t a bunch of markup along the way which means the savings is passed onto the consumer. If the initial reports we have seen prove anything this will end up being a very popular rifle in the various precision rifle competitions. Head on over to their Facebook, website, or Instagram to learn more, or pre-order yourself one.