Reviewing approach

I have been thinking about how to structure my reviews. I initially considered rating airguns in a number of areas and then I spent some time thinking about which areas I should pick. But after a while I decided to drop this entire idea, as it tends to simplify results as much as it summarizes them, and in the end it would just allow comparisons that do not make sense. Instead, I decided to just describe each airgun and the experience of using it.

As I am not an accomplished target shooter, I will talk about accuracy in relative terms, by comparing the results I get with different guns rather than providing group size information, which tells more about my skills than about the capability of the airguns themselves. My reference airgun so far is the IZH-60 rifle, with which I get tight groups consistently.

All my target shooting is done standing up, using both hands, no external support, and the airgun's iron sights. I fire ten shots at a Gamo target and I collect the best result from each gun, so I can compare their potential. Doing this over many sessions also helps me eliminate the effect of bad ones during which my arms or eyes were tired.

An important feature of an airgun is its reliability - this, however, will take years to test - I will simply update each review if problems develop in time. This is one of those areas where I think this blog will provide special value - browsing other online reviews I either saw people having problems with newly purchased airguns or being very happy with them - I rarely saw users talking about how their gun broke a year after they purchased it. Many of the online reviews are also misleading, to the point where I often wonder if they were written by manufacturers. I have no connection to any airgun manufacturer, distributor, or seller, so my experience is simply that of a regular customer. One of the drawbacks of this, however, is that, as a regular customer, I will only be able to test one sample of each airgun. It could very well happen that I get unlucky (or lucky) with a purchase - the only thing I can do is to point out that my experience seems to differ from that of other reviewers.

And this being said, the next post will be the first review!