[lannie]

Originally Posted by sillyak

Vortex is one of the companies that doesn't make optics. They give a factory (owned by another company) a design and spec, factory makes them a prototype, they make any revisions as needed and the factory makes them the scope.

The number of companies that make optics in house is fairly small. (Even make can be contested as often parts are outsourced). In the hunting scope market it is essentially Leupold, Zeiss (only the high end lines), Swarovski and Meopta that I can think of.

Companies like Nikon will make their high end lines (like EDG binos) in house but farm out their cheaper lines to non Nikon owned factories. So there are some blurred lines in this discussion.

I thought Pentax was one of the largest optics manufacturers.