On a whitetail hunt a few years back i had both my Leica 8x42 binos and was using a borrowed rifle that had a Leupold 3.5x10x50 on a it. Right at last shooting time I found a shootable deer with the binos in a little clearing about 150 yards away. Now mind you this is real thick stuff where I hunt and very dark at all times of the day . I put the rifle up to shoot, the scope simply could not resolve the deer...looked like some sort of grey blob in the scope. I had shot deer from that stand other times with a 2.5x8 and a 3x9x33 at more or less the same time and I could not see a whole lot of difference between those scopes and this 50mm leupold. I think quality of the optics has a lot to do with it and maybe you would be better off with a 42mm Swarovski ... 44MM zeiss scope or 45mm LPS or something in that order if you have to have every last bit of light. IMO the drawbacks to having it(50mm objective) outweigh any advantages it may possess ...sitting higher on the rifle it is subject to more hard knocks...you have to use higher mounts which doesn't allow a good stock to cheek fit,it has a higher center of gravity and that big objective is vulnerable to being hit in real tight places not to mention it would be pretty useless in a scabbard if the need ever arose . I think the VXIII is a tougher scope because of the one piece tube and it has better coatings on the interior of the lenses where the VXII has multicoat just on the exterior surfaces.